Skip to main content

Full text of "Mr. Donnelly's reviewers"

See other formats 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


Mr.  Donnelly's  Reviewers 


BV 


WILLIAM    D.    O'CONNOR. 


1889. 

CHICAGO,  NEW  YORK,  SAN  FRANCISCO, 
BKLFORU,  CI.AKKF.  &  CO. 


Copyright  by 
W.  D.  O'CONNOR, 

lS8y. 


DONOHUE  &  HENXEBERRY. 

puinters  anp  btsders, 

Chicago. 


mote: 


IFn  rtDetnotiam- 


During  the  progress  of  these  pages  through  the 
press,  tlie  author,  William  D.  O'Connor,  Assistant 
General  Superintendent  of  the  Life  Saving  Service, 
passed  suddenly  away  from  the  conflicts  and  contro- 
versies of  life.  He  had  suffered  for  a  long  time 
from  partial  paralysis.  He  was  regarded  as  a  con- 
firmed sufferer,  and  the  announcement  of  his  death 
at  Washington  on  the  morning  of  May  9,  1887, 
came  as  a  sad  surprise  to  a  wide  circle  of  admiring 
friends.  Mr.  O'Connor  was  an  enthusiast  in  the 
work  in  which  he  was  engaged.  He  was  very  proud 
of  his  department  of  the  Government  service,  and 
often  spoke  hopefully  of  a  time  when  shipwrecks 
on  the  American  coast  would  be  almost  impossible. 

There  can  be  no  doubt  that  if  Mr.  O'Connor  had 
devoted  himself  wholly  to  literature  he  would  have 
made  more  than  a  common  murk.  As  it  is,  he  has 
left  behind  him  more  than  one  powerful  contribu- 
tion to  the  current  controversy  on  the  Baconian 
authorship  of  the  "  Shakspearean  plays."  He  took 
issue  with  the  late  Richard  Grant  White  on  this 
question,   and  made    most   chivalrous    appeals  in 


1 n97C45 


defense  of  Delia  Bacon  and  Mrs.  Potts.  Of  "  Ham- 
let's Note-book,"  one  of  his  most  effective  pieces  of 
work,  a  critic  says:  "This  book  —  whetlier  one 
believes  in  Bacon  as  the  author  of  '  Sliakspeare's 
Plays '  or  not — is  as  fine  a  piece  of  rhetorical  special 
pleading  as  the  annals  of  controversial  literature 
will  show." 

These  pages,  the  last  literary  effort  of  his  life, 
prove  how  earnestly  he  could  champion  a  cause, 
how  steadfastly  he  could  defend  a  man  whom  he 
thought  to  have  been  unfairly  dealt  with. 

Speaking  of  Mr.  O'Connor's  personal  qualities, 
Mr.  Henry  Latchford  says : 

"  From  time  to  time,  in  the  afternoon,  I  called 
at  his  office  in  the  Treasury  Building,  and  helped 
him  down  stairs  and  to  the  street  cars  on  Pennsyl- 
vania avenue.  He  always  had  something  delight- 
fully original  to  say  on  any  subject I 

had  heard  O'Connor  spoken  of  in  Dublin,  London, 
Paris  and  Boston  as  'a  spirit  finely  touched.'  It  is 
almost  impossible  to  describe  the  charm  of  his 
presence,  his  character,  his  voice,  grey  eyes,  silken 
yellow  hair  and  his  wonderful  conversation.  But  it 
is  possible  for  those  of  us  who  knew  him  to  say 
that  when  so  much  high  endeavor,  such  splendid 
intellect,  such  wide  sympathies,  and  such  a  gentle 
voice  have  been  embodied  in  one  human  being,  the 
death  of  this  rare  person  means  that  '  there  has 
passed  away  a  glory  from  the  earth.'" 


Mr.   DONNELLY'S    REVIEWERS. 

I. 

In  the  opening  pages  of  the  little  volume  on 
Bacon-Shakes])eare  matters,  entitled  Hamlets  Note- 
Book^  which  the  present  writer  published  a  couple  of 
years  ago,  the  question  was  raised  whether  reviews 
are  of  any  real  advantage  to  literature  —  whether 
they  are  not.  on  the  contrary,  a  serious  detriment, 
mainly  because  they  have  the  power,  through  the 
facile  medium  of  current  journals  and  periodicals,  to 
give  a  book  a  bad  name  in  advance,  and,  by  deterring 
readers,  either  absolutely  prevent  or  greatly  delay 
its  recognition.  Just  in  proportion  to  the  depth  or 
worth  of  the  book,  is  tliis  what  is  likely  to  hap- 
pen to  it. 

The  case  under  consideration  at  the  time  was 
that  of  Mrs.  Constance  M.  Pott's  edition  of  the 
Promus,  which,  until  then,  had  been  Lord  Bacon's 
only  unpuljlished  manuscript.  As  such,  it  was  of 
evident  value,  but  it  had  become  doublv  so  because 
]\[rs.  Pott  had  illustrated  its  sixteen  hundred  sen- 
tences by  parallel  passages  from  the  [Shakespeare 
drama,  nearly  all  of  which  were  plainly  in  relation, 
and  a  great  number  actually  identical  in  thought  and 
terms.  As  the  Promus  was  a  private  note-book  of 
Bacon's,  antedating  most  of  the  plays,  and  as  the  man 
William  Shakspere,  could  not  possibly  have  had 
access  to  it,  the  significance  of  the  coincidences  estab- 
lished by  the  parallels  in  such  (juantitics  is  a])i)aront 


8  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

to  any  candid  mind,  and  the  book  was,  therefore,  of 
excei)Uonal  ini])ortance.  Nevertheless,  Mr.  Richard 
Grant  AVhite  so  reviewed  it  in  the  Atlani'iG MontJdy 
when  it  a|){)eared,  as  to  create  the  conviction,  aided 
by  the  joui-nals  which  followed  his  lead,  that  it  was  a 
work  of  Innacy,  and  to  actnally  arrest  its  circu- 
lation. At  the  time  he  did  tliis,  he  himself,  as  I  have 
had  since  the  best  authority  for  knoAving,  had 
become  a  secret  convert  to  the  Baconian  theory,  and 
despised  and  loathed  the  Stratford  burgher  with  a 
sort  of  rancor  —  a  fact  which  his  papers  on  the 
AnaUymizaiio'n,  of  IShakespcare  sufficiently  indicate. 
The  lack  of  international  copyright  as  an  existing 
evil,  is  less  to  be  mourned  than  the  cold-hearted  sur- 
render of  literature  to  the  tribe  of  Jack  the  Ripper, 
involved  in  cases  hke  these.  There  are  bitter  hours 
when  we  could  well  yearn  for  the  S})acious  days 
when  authors  had  only  to  get  past  the  official  cen- 
sorship, bad  as  it  was,  and  face  the  free  judgment  of 
the  public,  without  the  perennial  intervention  of  the 
gangs  of  ignorant  and  impudent  men,  self-styled 
reviewers.  It  was  that  warm,  spontaneous,  disinter- 
ested popular  judgment  that  gave  welcome  to  the 
works  we  know  as  Cervantes  and  Calderon,  Dante 
and  Rabelais,  Moliere  and  Shakespeare,  and  saw 
them  securely  lodged  in  eternal  favor,  before  any 
banded  guild  of  detraction  could  exist  to  fret  their 
authors'  spirits,  check  their  genius,  or  lessen  them 
beforehand  in  public  interest  and  honor.  What 
would  the  modern  reviewers  have  done  to  them  ? 

The  w^orthlessness  of  the  critical  verdicts  of  this 
centui-y,  in  which  they  first  began,  is  measured  by 
the  fame  of  the  works  they  once  assailed.     It  would 


MR.  DOyNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  9 

be  difficult  to  name  any  cardinal  book  that  upon  its 
appearance  was  not  belittled,  censured  or  condemned 
by  the  literary  authorities  of  the  periodicals.  Every 
one  of  the  great  British  poets,  from  Scott  to  Tenny- 
son, had  to  run  the  gauntlet  of  abuse  and  denial,  and 
received  his  meed  of  praise,  after  long  waiting,  only 
from  the  slow  justice  of  the  common  reader.  It  is 
true  that  the  intelligent  critics  who  disparaged  and 
reviled  the  entire  galaxy,  including  Keats,  Shelley, 
Coleridge,  "Wordsworth  and  Byron,  closed  up  with 
astonishing  unanimity  in  roaring  eulog}^  on  Alex- 
ander Smith,  who  certainly  was  a  memorable  geyser 
of  splendid  metaphors,  but  is  now  almost  forgotten. 
In  France,  Victor  Hugo,  altogether  supreme  among 
the  geniuses  of  modern  Europe,  an  instance  almost 
unexampled  in  literature  of  demiurgic  power  and 
splendor,  was  so  derided  and  denounced  for  years  by 
these  men,  that  at  one  time,  so  George  Sand  tells  us, 
he  nearly  resolved  in  his  despair  to  lay  down  his  pen 
forever.  George  Sand  herself,  tlie  greatest  without 
exception  of  all  the  women  that  ever  wrote,  whose 
works  have  changed  the  tone  of  the  civilized  world 
in  respect  to  womankind,  and  who  has  insensibly 
altered  every  statute  book  in  Europe  and  America 
in  favor  of  her  sex,  was  for  many  years,  and  is  even 
at  times  now,  seen  onlv  throuo-h  the  reviewers'  tern- 

'  «/  CD 

pestuous  veiling  of  mud  for  darkness  and  bilge  water 
for  rain.  Her  great  romance,  Consicelo,  which,  were 
the  image  not  too  small,  might  be  compared  for 
purity  to  the  loveliest  new-blown  rose,  glittering 
with  the  dew  of  dawn — a  book  whose  central  char- 
acter is  the  verv  essence  of  noble  womanliness, 
kindred  in  art  to  Murillo's  Virgin — was  made  for 


10  Xm    J)  0  XX  KL  LT-S  RE  VIE  WER8. 

years  the  very  syiioiiyin  n[  infamy.  Ilcr  exquisite 
idyl  of  vilhi^^'e  life  in  France,  La  2)etite  Fadette,  I 
s;i\v  once  in  translation  here  (lisguised  under  the 
title  of  FiincliinK  and  the  author's  name  withheld 
from  the  title  page — all  for  the  sake  of  decency  !  In 
one  of  her  novels,  Leila,  she  makes  lier  beautiful 
heroine,  after  talking  to  her  lover  purely  and  elo- 
(juently  of  the  celestial  nature  of  love,  draw  his 
head  to  her  bosom  and  press  upon  it  her  sacred 
kisses;  and  I  am  told  that  an  apparently  true-born 
reviewer,  one  of  her  latest  French  critics,  evidently  a 
moral  demon,  the  academician  Caro— refers  to  this 
incident  as  a  sample  of  what  he  calls  her  "sensual 
ideality,''  and  holds  it  up  as  something  dripping 
with  offense  and  stench  and  horror!  The  critical  de- 
traction of  the  marvelous  Balzac  delayed  his  success 
until  late  in  life,  and  the  vital  and  life-giving  dra- 
matic creations  of  the  elder  Dumas,  with  their  extra- 
ordinary and  recondite  research,  their  measureless 
exuberance  of  invention,  and  the  unique,  jovial 
humor  they  have  as  a  distinct  element,  were  ignored 
or  mocked  by  the  mandarins  long  after  their  quali- 
ties had  made  them  dear  to  the  whole  reading  world. 
No  variety  of  books  has  escaped  the  injury  of  this 
fool  system,  which  sets  mediocrity  or  malignity  to 
arbitrate  over  talent  or  genius.  Everv  one  can 
remember  the  reception  given  to  Buckle's  Jlistory  of 
Ci.vilizatio7i,  a  work  of  diversified  and  enormous 
learning,  of  fresh  and  noble  views  into  the  life  of 
nations  like  the  opening  of  new  vistas,  and  among 
its  great  merits  the  quality,  inestimable  in  a  book, 
of  i)reaking  up  that  narcolepsia  which  even  the  best 
reading  will  induce,   and   rousing   and   holding  in 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  11 

animation  the  mind  of  the  peruser.  The  misrepresent- 
ation and  detraction  lieaped  upon  it  by  the  critical 
prints  were  profuse  and  incessant  until  the  appear- 
ance of  the  second  volume,  when  its  author  turned 
upon  his  assailants  in  a  lengthy  foot  note,  and  like  a 
o-allant  bull  gored  an  Edinburo-h  reviewer  in  a  wav 
to  make  the  matadors  and  picadors  alike  wary. 
Who  can  forget  the  foaming  assaults  of  the  army  of 
reviewing  boobies  and  bigots  through  which  Darwin 
at  length  swept  in  victory  to  his  triumph  and  his 
rest  beliind  the  rampart  of  his  proud,  immortal  tomb 
in  the  old  abbey?  On  the  poetry  of  Walt  Whit- 
man, in  which  Spirituality  appears  as  the  animating 
soul,  creating  and  permeating  every  word  and  every 
line,  as  it  does  every  detail,  gross  or  delicate,  of  the 
natural  world,  and  whose  simple  grandeur  has 
entered  the  spirits  of  all  who  are  greatest  in  Europe 
and  this  country,  the  current  criticism  was  long,  and 
until  recently,  nothing  but  a  storm  of  brutal  pas- 
quinades. As  one  looks  back  and  sees,  by  the  ulti- 
mate triamph  of  the  sterling  books  in  every 
instance,  upon  what  paltrv  and  fictitious  pretenses 
tlie  indictments  upon  them  must  have  been  made, 
it  becomes  more  and  more  a  marvel  tliat  such  an 
abominable  order  of  tribunals  should  have  ever  come 
into  vogue  or  been  so  long  tolerated. 

II. 

The  latest  exam])le  in  point  is  the  treatment  which 
Mr.  Donnelly's  exti-aordinary  work.  The  Great  Cryj)- 
togram^  has  received  from  the  critics  of  a  number  of 
our  leading  journals.  So  much  has  already  been 
said  that  it  is  not   necessary    to  more   than    briefly 


12  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

describe  the  character  of  this  vokimc.  Although 
nearly  a  thousand  pages  in  length,  it  has,  by  the 
general  admission  of  its  readers,  an  absorbing  inter- 
est. The  tirst  half  contains  a  formidable  argument, 
supported  at  every  ]>oiiit  by  copious  facts,  against 
Shakspere  as  the  author  of  the  drama  alBliated 
upon  his  name,  and  in  favor  of  Lord  Bacon  ;  and 
whatever  may  be  its  flaws  or  defects,  every  sensible 
and  unbiased  mind  will  consider  it  masterly.  The 
second  part  is  devoted  to  the  exhibition  of  the  nar- 
rative which  Mr.  Donnelly  asserts  was  interwoven 
by  Bacon,  word  by  word,  through  the  text  of  the 
plays.  This,  so  far  as  the  extracts  of  it  given  can 
show,  is  to  be  Bacon's  autobiography;  comprising  the 
history  of  his  relation  to  the  actor  and  manager 
Shakspere  and  to  the  Shakespeare  dramas;  to 
the  life  of  the  Elizabethan  court ;  and  to  the  uni- 
multiplex  transactions  of  his  time.  Of  course, 
though  sufficiently  ample,  a  comparatively  small 
part  of  the  marvelous  tale  is  given,  for  the  reason 
that  the  labor  of  a  number  of  years,  which  even 
tlie  worst  enemies  of  the  book  concede  to  have  been 
stupendous  in  patience  and  diligence,  did  not  enable 
Mr.  DonnelW  to  completely  decipher  more ;  and  it 
was  to  enable  himself  to  finish  the  woik  he  had 
begun  on  two  interlocking  plays  that,  forced  into 
print,  he  decided  for  prudential  reasons  connected 
with  the  preservation  of  his  copyright  to  withhold 
the  basic  or  root  numbers  of  the  cipher  for  the 
present.  With  this  reservation,  the  book,  perfectly 
unanswerable  in  its  main  argument,  was  published, 
and  at  once,  and  before  it  could  get  to  the  public, 
the    reviewers    of    several    journals    of    enormous 


MR.  D  Oy^yEL  LYS  RE  VIE  WERS.  13 

circulation  and  great  popular  credit  fell  upon  it  pell- 
mell.  The  ])retext  given  for  its  critical  demolition 
\Yas  that  the  primar}'  numbers  of  the  cipher  had 
been  withheld;  and  hence  it  was  assumed  or  argued 
that  Mr.  Donnelly  must  be,  at  least,  a  victim  of 
unconscious  cerebration  or  a  lunatic,  but  morcprob-/ 
bly  and  reasonably  a  fraud,  a  forger,  a  cheat,  a  liar,, 
a  swindler  and  a  scoundrel.  The  singular  and  strik-' 
ing  narrative  he  had  extricated  fi'om  the  text  of  the 
plays  was  declared  to  be  nothing  but  a  cento  ob- 
tained l:>y  i)icking  out  the  woi'ds  he  wanted  and 
stringing  them  together  as  he  chose,  without  any 
logical  connection  with  thellgureshe  paraded.  The 
brave  zealots  for  the  truth  who  thus  exposed  him  in 
all  his  hideous  moral  deformity,  ignored,  wdiat  any 
merely  thoughtful  or  candid  person  would  have 
observed,  that,  although  the  basic  numbers  of  the 
cipher  had  been  withheld,  the  working  numbers 
which  remained  showed  a  uniformity  and  limitation, 
which  made  the  idea  of  imposture  not  only  impossible 
but  perfectly  I'idiculous,  and  at  the  very  least,  cre- 
ated a  tremendous  presumption  in  favor  of  the  reality 
and  validity  ofthe  cryptogram.  But  the  revilers,  in 
their  prepense  determination  to  reduce  to  nothingness 
the  results  of  years  of  weary  toil,  looked  out  of  sight 
a  still  more  important  consideration.  It  is  manifest 
that,  after  all,  a  great  mathematical  problem  must 
be  decided  by  an  adept  in  mathematics.  If  doubt 
exists  in  regard  to  the  verity  of  a  complex  crypto- 
graph, none  but  a  skilled  cryptologist  can  resolve  it. 
In  the  case  under  notice  this  had  been  done.  Im- 
mediately upon  the  publication  of  the  book  Pro- 
fessor   Colbert,    a     distinguished     mathematician, 


J4  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

having  previously  been  admitted  in  confidence  to  a 
complete  knowledge  ol'  all  the  laws  and  numbers  of 
the  cipher,  disclosed  or  withheld,  came  out  in  a 
lengthy  article  in  the  Chicago  Tribune,  a  journal  of 
great  distinction  and  circulation,  and  roundly  certi- 
fied, without  an\'  qualification,  to  the  absolute 
validity  and  reality  of  the  cryptogram!  In  view  of 
this  decisive  scientific  judgment,  coming  from  a 
source  unaccused  and  inaccusable  by  even  the  most 
unscrupulous  of  the  anti-Donnelly  banditti,  how 
could  any  one  dare  to  call  the  verity  and  regularity 
of  the  cipher  into  question?  And  how,  in  view  of 
the  decree  of  an  authority  like  Professor  Colbert, 
could  even  the  most  unprincipled  and  reckless  of  the 
patient  scholar's  abusers,  have  had  the  measureless 
brass  to  go  the  length  of  covering  him  with  scurril 
epithets  ?  But  the  case  against  the  dealers  in  stigma 
is  even  worse  than  as  stated.  At  about  the  date  of 
Professor  Colbert's  finding,  Mr.  Donnelly,  who  was 
then  in  London,  consented,  at  the  solicitation  of  Mr. 
Knowles,  the  editor  of  the  Nineteenth  Century 
magazine,  a  disinterested  person,  to  submit  the  entire 
cipher  to  the'judgment  of  a  scientific  expert,  to  be 
j  chosen  by  Mr.  Knowles.  The  selection  fell  upon 
I  Mr.  George  Parker  Bidder,  a  Queen's  Counsel, 
which  is  the  highest  grade  of  lawyers  in  Great 
Britain,  and  one  of  the  most  eminent  mathema- 
ticians in  England.  After  a  careful  study,  Mr. 
P)idder  reported  that  Mr.  Donnell}^  had  made  a 
great  and  extraordinary  discovery,  and  that,  although 
the  work  was  not  without  errors  in  execution,  the 
existence  of  the  cipher  was  undeniable.  Here,  then, 
was  additional  and   incontestible   proof    that    Mr. 


MR.  DONNELL  7  'S  RE  VIE  WER8.  15 

Donnelly's  cryptogram  was  neither  a  delusion  nor  a 
fraud,  but  a  reality.  The  iinding  rested  now  upon 
the  perfect  knowledge  and  unquestioned  integrity  of 
two  eminent  men,  widely  removed  from  each  other. 
Under  these  circumstances  it  is  nothing  but  folly  or 
impudence  in  any  reviewer  to  deny  evidence  which 
is  not  based  on  opinion,  but  on  certainty.  The  exis- 
tence of  the  Bacoiiian  cipher  in  the  Shakespeare 
text,  in  view  of  the  decision  of  persons  who  are 
authorities,  is  no  longer  a  hypothesis ;  it  is  a  fact ! 
Suppose  an  astronomer  should  announce,  simply  by 
astronomical  calculations  based  on  certain  phe- 
nomena, the  existence  and  locality  of  a  new  planet, 
as  Leverrier  did  in  the  case  of  the  planet  Neptune, 
subsequently  found  by  Dr.  Galle's  telescope  :  a  host 
of  people  might  assert  its  non-existence,  but  if 
Laplace  and  Herschel  said,  "  We  have  verified  the 
calculations  ;  the  star  is  there,"  doubt  and  debate 
would  end,  for  the  experts  had  S]joken.  Nothing 
after,  but  to  wait  until  the  lens  made  the  discovery. 
The  confirmations  of  astronomers  as  to  the  exis- 
tence of  an  undiscovered  planet  are  no  more 
decisive  than  those  of  crj^ptographers  as  to  the 
existence  of  an  uncompleted  cipher. 

Subsequent  to  the  decision  of  Messrs.  Colbert  and 
Bidder,  two  other  eminent  authorities,  after  examin- 
ation, rendered  a  similar  judgment.  One  of  them 
is  Sir  Joseph  Neale  McKenna,  a  distinguished  crypt- 
ologist  and  member  of  Parliament ;  at  Dublin,  the 
other  the  Count  D'Eckstadt,  a  celebrated  Austrian 
scholar  and  diplomat,  all  his  life  versed  in  secret 
writing  as  used  in  European  courts. 


IG  MR.  DONNELL 7 'S  REYIE WERS. 

Of  the  existence  of  the  scientific  decision,  sup- 
porting the  claims  of  the  cipher,  the  reviewers  were 
well  aware,  for  it  w^as  widely  published  prior  to 
their  onslaughts.  But  what  care  they  for  decis- 
ions? The  purpose  of  the  fii])pant  persifleur  or 
the  literary  slasher  holds  against  all  oracles.  These 
men  would  have  denied  algebra,  and  "reviewed," 
without  mercy,  the  Arab  that  devised  it. 

III. 

1  do  not  wish  to  include  Professor  Davidson 
among  them.  He  was  the  first  to  put  forth,  in  two 
columns  of  the  New  York  World  (April  29th,  '88),  an 
adverse  judgment  on  the  cipher  part  of  Mr.  Don- 
nelly's book,  and  this  was  prior  to  the  verdict  of 
Professor  Colbert  and  Mr.  Bidder.  Had  he  been 
aware  of  it,  being  one  who  knows  what  is  due  to  a 
scientific  decree,  it  might  have  arrested  his  action, 
which  I  am  confident  he  wnll  yet  retract  and  be 
sorrv  for.  I  withhold  an  examination  of  his  article, 
being  content  to  remark  that  it  is  manifestly  wholly 
based  on  suppositions  and  assumptions,  as  the  reader 
mio-ht  have  seen,  and  that  these  are  not  borne  out 
by  the  facts,  as  I  ha]->pen  to  know.  More,  however, 
to  be  regretted  than  any  of  his  badly -taken  points  is 
the  haste  wnth  which  he  rushed  into  i)rint  to  dis- 
credit Mr.  Donnelly's  volume.  His  article  was 
dated  April  29th,  written,  of  course,  at  a  date  still 
earlier,  and  the  book  was  issued  on  the  2d  of  May 
following.  Thus,  for  at  least  three  days  before 
publication,  he  had  a  clear  field  with  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  readers,  prejudicing  them  against  the 
book,  not  only  by  his  plausible  statements,  but  by 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  17 

his  personal  distinction  as  a  brilliant  and  learned 
man.  The  blow  came  from  him  with  double  force 
in  vieAV  of  the  fact  that  he,  more  than  anyone  else, 
had  advanced  the  credit  of  the  cipher  by  his  long 
and  favorable  provisional  report,  based  upon  a 
partial  investigation  in  a  former  issue  of  The  World. 
His  later  article  had,  therefore,  all  the  effect  of  a 
formal  retraction  or  palinode.  This  virtual  change 
of  front  was  surely  astounding.  Some  persons  have 
ascribed  it  to  sheer  timidity.  It  may  be  so,  but  I 
sincerely  hope  not.  Certainly  he  showed  valiancy 
enough  when,  in  his  extended  report  in  The  Wo/id, 
he  faced  the  bitter  and  silly  Shaksperean  prejudice, 
and  threw  just  and  favoring  light  in  advance  on 
Mr.  Donnelly's  magnificent  discovery.  It  is  said, 
however,  that  Marshal  Saxe,  queller  of  armies, 
Avould  sink  into  what  De  Quincey  and  his  English 
call,  "  a  blue  funk,"  and  quake  with  terror  if  a  mouse 
appeared  in  his  private  chamber;  and  it  may  be 
that  at  last,  with  the  cipher  before  him  not  abso- 
lutely proved,  and  the  mountain  of  Shakspereolatry 
in  full  throe  on  the  horizon,  Professor  Davidson 
quailed  at  the  prospect  of  the  contemptible  small 
derision  that  threatened  to  enter  his  cloister. 

Another  critic  who  deserves  to  be  noticed  no 
less  mildly  than  Professor  Davidson,  if  only  out  of 
the  respect  due  to  misfortune,  is  Mr.  John  J.  Jen- 
nings, who,  at  that  time,  on  May  6th,  occupied  nearly 
three  solid  columns  of  the  St.  Louis  Post-DeqxUch  in 
the  effort  to  establish  that  the  Donnelly  cipher  is  only 
a  simple  case  of  arithmetical  progression  ;  that  Mr. 
Donnelly  is  the  deluded  victim  of  his  own  arithmetic ; 
that  the  numerical  array  of  cipher  figures  is  really 


JS  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVTE WE RS. 

uU  ininige;  and  that  as  for  the  cipher  itself,  hke  the 
crater  of  Vesuvius,  according  to  the  hlase  Sir 
Charles  Coldstream,  there  is  "  nothing  in  it."  Vol- 
taire says  of  Dante,  that  his  obscurity  causes  him 
to  be  no  longer  understood,  adding  that  he  has  had 
commentators,  which  is  perhaps  another  reason.  I 
will  not  insist  upon  any  parallel  between  Mi'.  Jen- 
nings and  Dante  (the  action  of  the  imagination  of 
these  two  poets  being  widely  different),  further  than 
to  remark  tliat  the  mathematical  exhibit  in  Mr. 
Jennings'  article  is  a  decided  case  of  woven  darkness; 
and,  as  he  has  been  favorably  accepted  and  com- 
mented on  by  several  of  the  intellectual  reviewers 
under  notice,  it  may  be  that  their  exegesis  has 
greatly  obscured,  in  my  apprehension,  the  mochis  oper- 
andi of  his  ingenious  rebus.  Certainly'  it  would 
seem,  by  the  terms  in  which  his  scholiasts  interpret 
and  approve  his  demonstrations,  that  each  of  their 
brains  had  turned  into  a  pint  of  small  white  beans, 
a  condition  to  which  his  composition  assuredly  tends 
to  reduce  the  minds  of  all  his  readers.  His  general 
object  is  to  show  the  utter  shallowness  and  absurd- 
ity of  Mr.  Donnelly  in  attempting  to  w^ithhold  and 
conceal  his  primary  or  root  number,  which  he 
declares  is  perfectly  patent,  and  then,  by  a  series  of 
bewildering  little  computations,  proceeds  to  expose. 
The  number,  he  says,  is  always  and  everywhere,  by 
all  permutations  and  in  all  sorts  of  ways,  simply 
222,  and  to  this  he  conjoins  in  some  mysterious 
fashion,  perfectly  dumbfoundering  to  me,  what  he 
calls  "  a  beautiful  and  buoyant  little  modifier — the 
figure  oneP  When  I  read  all  this,  it  made  me  think 
of  the  equally  luminous  method  by  w^hich  certain 


MR.  DONNELLT'S  REVIEWERS.  19 

pei'sons,  according  to  good  old  Fatlier  Tlabelals,  get 
at  tJie  ages  of  the  heroic  and  daemonic  C3^cle.  The 
c%ire  of  Meudon  sa3^s  in  his  profuse  and  jolly  manner : 
"As  for  the  demigods,  fauns,  satyrs,  S3'lvans,  hob- 
goblins, tegipanes,  nymphs,  heroes  and  demons, 
several  men  have,  from  the  total  sum  which  is  the 
result  of  the  divers  ages  calculated  bv  Hesiod, 
reckoned  their  life  to  be  nine  thousand  seven  hun- 
dred and  twenty  3'ears;  this  sum  consisting  of  four 
special  numbers,  orderly  arising  from  07ie\  the  same 
added  together  and  multiplied  by  four  every  way, 
amounts  to  forty  ;  these  forties  being  reduced  into 
triangles  by  five  times,  make  up  the  total  of  the 
aforesaid  number."  Mr.  Jennings'  explication  of 
the  Donnelly  cipher,  conceived  in  all  sei'iousness, 
thougii  tossed  with  nonchalant  and  gay  assurance 
to  the  public,  and  culminating  in  his  ubiquitous  222, 
"orderly  arising  from  one,"  would  perfectly  match 
the  dumfoozler  of  liabelais  if  it  onl\'  had  some- 
thing of  its  sane  mockery.  When  it  first  appeared, 
there  were  three  or  four  persons  in  the  country,  who, 
knowing  Mr.  Donnelly's  real  basic  number,  must 
have  smiled  to  the  depths  of  their  midi-iffs  at  the 
spectral  unreality  of  the  substitute.  "Weeks  later, 
when  Mr.  Donnelly,  yielding  to  a  general  desire, 
published  the  root  number  in  question,  which  was 
836,  it  must  have  been  interesting  to  see  Mr.  Jen- 
nings' face  lengthen  at  the  suddenly  disclosed  dis- 
crepancy between  the  true  figure,  and  the  one  he 
had  revealed  with  such  dogmatic  confidence,  together 
with  its  "buoyant  and  beautiful  little  modifier  — 
the  figure  ouey  Perhaps,  however,  the  conscious- 
ness that  his  liginciit  had,   in   the  interim,   wrought 


20  M  R.  D  ONNELL  Y  'S  BE  VIE  WERS. 

some  injury  to  the  circulation  of  the  Donnelly 
volume,  may  have  consoled  him  for  the  disaster  that 
had  befallen  his  sapient  revelation.  That  before  its 
refutation  or  exposure,  any  part  of  the  po})ulation 
could  have  been  deterred  by  such  a  baseless  fabric 
of  a  vision  from  reading  the  book  before  rejecting 
it,  would  seem  to  show  that  we  have  among  us 
Captain  Cook's  Pelew  Islanders  in  all  their  guileless 
innocence. 

Still  another  proof  of  the  Arcadian  simplicity  of 
some  readers  is  afforded  by  the  credit  which  appears 
to  have  been  given  to  an  article  in  the  St.  Paul 
Pioneer-Press  of  May  Gth,  afterward  promoted  to 
the  dignity  of  a  pamphlet,  and  widely  circulated, 
especially  at  the  West.  It  is  entitled  The  Little 
Cryptogram,  and  is  the  work  of  Mr.  J.  Gilpin  Pyle. 
Its  strain  is  that  of  a  rather  venomous  badinage, 
and  its  serious  object  to  destroy  the  credibility  of 
the  cipher,  by  showing  that  under  its  rules  you  can 
get  any  narrative  you  choose.  The  way  the  author 
illustrates  this  is  to  compose  an  insulting  sentence 
made  up  from  the  text  of  Hamlet^  and  lay  alongside 
its  several  words  the  figures  of  a  mock-cipher.  Of 
course  the  process  differs  from  Mr.  Donnelly's  in 
being  perfectly  arbitrary,  and  equally  of  course  the 
performance  is  sheer  travesty.  Yet  I  w^as  credibl}" 
informed  by  a  gentleman  who  had  traveled  at  the 
time  through  the  ]S"orthwest  that  numbers  of  people 
considered  this  rank  and  shallow  burlesque  irresisti- 
ble in  point  of  humor,  and  an  utter  refutation  of 
the  methods  of  the  cryptogram.  Messrs.  Colbert 
and  Bidder,  witnesses  to  the  science  of  Mr.  Donnelly's 
solutions,  would  hardly  think  Mr.  Pyle's  transparent 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  SI 

buff(Jonery  worth  a  smile,  but  they  might  easily  be 
led  to  stare  at  the  spectacle  of  sensible  people  giving 
it  the  sliti-htest  credence.  A  similar  excursion  was 
made  in  the  New  York  Snn  of  May  6th.  The  author 
of  the  Cryptograni  had  deciphered  of  Ann  Hatha- 
way, '*  She  hath  a  fine  complexion,  with  a  high 
coh)r  and  long  red  hair,"  and  the  witty  editor,  paro- 
dying the  cipher  method,  continued  with,  "  She 
sometimes  rode,  ]>erforce,  a  costermonger's  white 
liorse."  But  as  this  chimed  in  with  the  current  fad 
that  a  white  horse  is  always  seen    in   the   neioiibor- 

%j  CD 

Jiood  of  a  red-headed  girl,  one  could  be  merely 
amused,  and  say  Ughtly,  "  The  Sun  is  a  jolly  joker; 
it  smiles  for  alL''  Whoever  felt  in  the  witticism  an 
unfair  mockery  felt  also  that  the  injurious  intention 
was  quenched  in  the  fun,  and  could  declare  like 
Jupiter  in  Hugo's  poem,  "  T  have  laughed,  therefore 
I  j)ardon."  The  effect  in  Mr.  Pyle's  squib  is  differ- 
ent, lie  is  not  witty,  and  only  produces  a  piece  of 
sardonic  slang,  which  aims  to  do  harm,  and  rests 
upon  naked  misrepresentation.  The  sentence  lie  pre- 
tends to  extract  from  Jlamlet  by  the  cipher  metliod 
is  this  :  "  Dou-n ill-he,  the  author,  politician  and 
mountebanke,  w^ill  work  out  the  secret  of  this  play. 
The  sage  is  a  daysie."'  One  might  as  easily  find  in 
\.\\Q  Mtdsummer''s  Night  Dream,  by  such  a  cipher- 
method  :  •'  If  Jay-Gil-Pin-Pyle  will  onlie  tie  his  ears  j 
over  his  heade  in  a  neat  bow-knot,  and  put  on  his 
liatte  and  keepe  it  on,  no  one  will  readily  find  out 
his  resemblance  to  Nick  Bottom.  The  hoodlum  is  a 
peach-blossom."  But  Mr.  Pyle  might  think  this 
style  of  cipher  rather  personal.  Tt  certainly  is  entirely 
apocryphal,  which   is    another    resemblance.     Such 


XS  MR.  DONNELL  Y  'S  RE  VIE  WERS. 

an  attempt  at  invalidation  is  really  beneath  even 
contein])t,  but  one  can  hardl}'  help  feeling  something- 
like  indignation  to  think  that  means  like  these 
should  be  employed  to  break  down  an  honest  authoi'. 


lY* 


The  foregoing  are  samples  of  some  outlying  varie- 
ties of  ill  treatment  to  whicli  TJie  Great  Cryptogram^ 
has  been  subjected.  But  the  full  force  of  hostile 
criticism  is  not  seen  until  we  come  to  the  pure 
literary  censure,  where  the  small  deceit  and  sinful 
games  of  the  professional  reviewer  have  full  ])lay. 
A  writer  in  the  Boston  Dally  Advertiser  having 
announced  that  Mr.  Donnelly's  book  is  dead,  adds 
that  it  is  because  ''the  best  judges''  have  condemned 
it.  Let  us  see,  therefore,  by  their  judgments,  what 
manner  of  men  are  "  the  best  judges." 

First  in  order  of  dignity  is  Mr.  A])pleton  Morgan, 
the  president  of  the  New  Yoi-k  Shakespeare  Societv. 
As  Mr.  Morgan  for  some  time,  long  before  he  could 
really  know  anything  about  the  cipher,  for  the  book 
was  not  then  published,  had  done  his  best  in  various 
ways  to  sap  and  break  it  down  in  advance,  his  public 
appearance  against  it  in  an  elaborate  article,  nearly 
three  columns  long,  close  type,  in  the  New  York 
World  of  May  6th,  was  simply  logical,  though  per- 
haps unexpected.  He  had  been  an  avowed  Baconian, 
a  still  more  avowed  anti-Shakespearean ;  and  what 
had  actuated  his  private  enmity  to  the  Donnelly 
book  before  he  had  read  it,  and  his  subsequent  open 
attempt  to  set  the  myriad  readers  of  The  World 
against  it,  is  best  known  to  himself. 


MR.  DONNELLY' S  REVIEWERS.  23 

It  is  curious  to  follow  his  points.  He  begins 
with  the  dogmatic  assertion,  shotted  to  the  muzzle 
with  insult  and  dishonor,  that  Mr.  Donnelly  has 
fabricated  a  story  which  is  merely  a  cento — a  novel- 
lette  compacted  of  Shakespeare  words;  and  has 
foisted  it  off  by  a  trick  of  figures  as  a  cipher  nar- 
rative of  Lord  Bacon's. 

To  show  that  no  real  cipher  exists  in  the  text,  he 
asserts,  with  the  air  of  one  who  was  present  when 
the  first  folio  was  printed,  and  knows  all  about  it, 
that  four  printing  houses  in  London  were  concerned 
in  its  manufacture,  viz. :  the  establishments  of  W. 
Jaggard,  Ed.  Blount,  I.  Southweeke  and  W.  Aspley, 
whose  names  were  printed  in  the  colophon  as  respon- 
sible for  the  press- work;  and  that  consequently  no 
four  printing  houses,  nor  one  printing  house,  could 
have  preserved  the  particular  arrangement  of  the 
words  on  the  page  on  which,  as  Mr.  Donnelly  has 
found,  the  order  of  the  cipher  depends.  Does  not 
Mr.  Donnelly  see  this?  he  asks,  tauntingly.  If  Mr. 
I^onnellysees  what  I  see,  he  sees  that  the  inflexible 
rule  of  the  old  printing  offices  was,  "  Follow  copy,  if 
3-()U  have  to  follow  it  out  of  the  window  !"  and  this 
disposes  at  once  of  Mr.  Morgan's  idle  objection. 
Under  the  orders  of  the  hired  proof-reader,  or  the 
master  of  the  establishment,  paid  to  secure  compli- 
ance, the  printers  would  set  up  with  Chinese  fidelity 
exactU'  what  was  put  before  them,  and  preserve 
intact  the  arrangement  of  the  words  upon  the  page, 
whcthei"  they  were  in  four  printing  houses  or  forty. 
That  exactly  this  was  done  in  the  case  of  the  great 
folio,  we  have  positive  evidence.  The  folio  is  gen- 
erally well,  and  even  carefully  gotten  up,  but  there 


QJ^  MR.  D ONNELL  Y  'S  HE  VIE  WERS. 

are  certain  places  in  it — exceptional  pa_2,'es,  whole 
plays,  and  notably  the  entire  section  ol'  the  book 
called  ///stories— where  the  typograjihical  eccentrici- 
ties and  violations  are  such  that  they  never  could 
have  been  made  except  by  printers  working  mechan- 
ically in  blind  obedience  to  orders.  We  lind  false 
paging,  words  improperly  hyphenated,  words  im]ii-oj>- 
erly  bracketed,  a  preconcerted  number  of  words 
forced  and  strained  by  uncouth  devices  into  the  page 
or  column,  v.'ith  the  manifest  intention  of  having  just 
so  many  there,  neither  less  nor  more — things  which 
no  master-printer  or  proof-reader  would  overlook  or 
tolerate  in  a  book  unless  by  design,  and  which  Mr. 
Donnelly  has  found  are  the  conditions  of  the  ci])her. 
That  these  peculiarities  were  intentional  is  proved 
by  the  following  fact :  In  1682,  nine  years  after  the 
publication  of  the  first  folio,  liacon  and  Shakespeare 
being  both  dead,  another  edition  of  the  folio  was 
issued.  Stereotype  did  not  then  exist,  and  the  book 
was  certainly  reset.  Here,  then,  was  a)i  ()j)p()rtunity 
to  correct  the  typographical  errors,  ostensil)l  v  mon- 
strous, and  impossible  to  any  directing  ])rinter,  which 
deformed  the  volume.  What  do  we  find?  A  few 
petty  errors,  mostl}'  typographical,  are  corrected, 
showing  that  the  book  was  reset  under  supervision, 
not  mechanically  ;  but  the  most  notable  are  spared, 
and  the  section  of  the  folio  called  Histories — that  is, 
the  historical  plays — where  the  seeming  mistakes  and 
perversions  make  a  thick-crowded  jungle  of  incon- 
gruity and  absurdity,  is  absolutely  duplicated  !  The 
inference  is  inevitable  that  some  one  survived  to  com- 
pel the  types  to  maintain  the  apparently  false  order 
of  nine  years  before,  and  preserve  intact  the  wrong 


ME.  DONXELLT'S  REVIEWERS.  25 

pagination,  the  ridiculous  h^^phenation  and  bracket- 
ing, the  grotesque  word-crowding,  and  all  the  other 
eccentricities  which  mark  the  original  folio.  Mr. 
Morgan  says  that  this  t\"pographical  anarchy  could 
not  have  been  deliberately  carried  out  in  the  first 
folio.  That  it  was  cari'ied  out  in  the  first  folio  is 
decisively  proved  b}^  the  fact  that  it  was  carried  out 
again,  without  the  least  variation  (exceptions  nofed), 
in  the  second  folio.  It  was  done  in  botii  cases 
simply  by  the  ])rinters  following  copy,  as  they  were 
bound  to  do,  and  as  it  was  an  iron  rule  to  do.  Mr. 
Morgan  can  never  make  any  person  of  sense  or  fair- 
ness, who  knows  these  facts,  believe  that  it  was  done 
without  design  or  by  accident,  and  his  attempt  to 
show  that  Mr.  Donnelly  has  thus  no  basis  in  reason 
for  his  cipher,  is  obviously  a  piece  of  pitiable  weak- 
ness and  futilitv. 

His  remarks  immediately  following  are  not  worth 
comment.  They  seein  singularly  mud-witted  and 
wandering,  and  are  simply  in  continuation  of  his 
assertion,  already  disproved,  that  Mr.  Donnelly  has 
failed  to  see  that  the  typographical  eccentricities  of 
the  folio  are  due  to  mere  "  shiftlessness"  on  the 
part  of  the  printers,  and  therefore  afford  no  basis 
for  cipher  computations.  To  establish  this,  he 
descants  with  ludicrous  incoherence  on  the  odd  fact 
that  only  one  or  two  pages  of  the  folio  version  of 
Ti'ollus  and  Cress'ula  are  paged,  while  the  rest  are 
left  unnumbered.  This  he  explains  on  the  theory 
that  the  ])rinter  did  not  know  where  to  ])ut  the 
play.  I  do  not  see,  nor  can  anybody  see,  why  this 
should  have  made  him  fail  to  complete  paging  it, 
nor  do  I  sec  how  the  fact  can   in  any  way  affect 


S6  MB.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

injuriously  those  conclusions  oF  JNIi'.  Donnelly  to 
which  great  exi)ei'ts  in  cryptology  have  clone  rever- 
ence. 

Some  floundering,  however,  may  be  expected 
from  "Mr.  Morgan  on  these  unfamiliar  grounds,  and 
his  foot  is  only  on  his  native  heath  when  he  comes 
upon  philology,  essaying  to  show  that  the  cipher 
laniiuaffe  is  that  of  the  nineteenth,  and  not  of  the 
seventeenth  century ;  and  hence  that  Mr.  Donnelly 
is  a  clumsy  forger.  To  expose  the  awkward  villain 
by  pure  philological  tests  is  now  his  purpose,  and  he 
Ijegins  bv  citing  a  sentence  from  the  cipher  narra- 
rative.     The  itahcs  are  mine  : 

"  He  [Shakspere]  is  tlie  son  of  a  poor  peasant,  who 
yet  follows  the  trade  of  glove-making  in  the  Jiole 
where  he  was  born  and  bred — one  of  the  peasant 
towns  of  the  West.  And  there  are  even  rumors  that 
"Will  and  his  brother  did  themselves  follow  the  trade 
for  some  time  before  they  came  here." 

To  this  sentence  Mr.  Morgan  at  once  applies  the 
fatal  philological  pick.  ''Yet"  in  the  sense  of 
''Still."  he  says,  is  considerabl}^  later  than  Bacon's 
date.  The  assertion  of  so  eminent  an  authority 
must  have  been  very  damaging  to  Mr.  Donnelly  in 
the  minds  of  the  multitudinous  readers  of  The  ^Vorld, 
who  doubtless  at  once  thought  the  cipher  fairly 
convicted  and  exposed.  As  Mr.  Morgan,  however, 
unaccountably  mentioned  Dr.  Abbott's  Shal'esjjearean 
Gramm,ar  in  this  connection,  I  at  once  turned  to  the 
book,  and  found  in  the  very  first  instance  of  the 
Elizabethan  use  of  the  word,  his  assertion  flatly 
contradicted.  ''Yet  in  the  sense  of  still"  explains 
Dr  Abbott;  and   showing  that  it  is   not,   as  Mr. 


ME.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  27 

Morgan    says,    "considerably    later    than    Bacon's 
date,"  he  quotes : 

"You,  Diana, 
Under  my  poor  iustrurtions  yd  must  suffer, 
Something  in  my  behalf." 

Alls  Well  That  Ends  Well,  Art  IV,  Sc.  4. 

One  might  expect  a  better  knowledge  of  the  text 
of  Shakespeare  in  the  president  of  the  New  York 
Shakespeare  Society.  But  Mr.  Morgan  has  been  a 
Baconian,  as  he  avows,  and  we  poor  Baconians  are 
so  ignorant ! 

Here  is  another  instance,  not  in  Dr.  Abbott  (but 
tlie  instances  are  plentiful),  of  "yet"  being  used  in 
the  sense  of  "  still."     It  is  Portia  chiding  Brutus : 

' '  I  urged  you  further ;  then  you  scratched  your  head 
And  too  impatiently  stamped  with  your  foot: 
Yet  I  insisted,  yet  you  answered  not." 

Julius  Ca/sar,  Act  til,  Sc.  1. 
And  here,  again,  is  Brutus  in  the  battle: 
"Fe^,  countrymen,  O  yet  hold  uj)  your  heads!" 

Julius  Ocesm;  Act  V,  Sc.  4. 

It  is  noticeable  that  Mr.  Mor^'an  "•ets  awav, 
with  perhaps  instinctive  brevity,  from  this  perilous 
point  of  cavil,  and  comes  swiftly  to  his  second 
instance — "  hole."  "  The  allusion  to  a  country  town 
as  a  hole  is,"  he  says,  "a  very  modern  usage."  I  am 
not  at  all  sure  that  the  word  "hole"  in  the  cipher 
does  not  refer  to  the  river  valley  of  Stafford  on- A  von, 
the  term  then  being  archaic  Saxon  or  Anglo-Saxon 
for  dale  or  valley.  I  do  not  assert  this,  however, 
but  assume  that  a  town  is  meant  in  the  cipher.  In 
this  sense  it  is  commonly  used  contumeliously,  in  the 
vernacular  of  this  country  and  also  of  Great  Britain, 
though  probably  rarely  in  literature.     I  heard  of  a 


28  -VI! .  D ONXELL  Y'S  EE  VIE  WEES. 

lively  Judy  .saying  with  imicli  bounce;,  years  ago,  . 
"Before  I'd  live  in  such  a  miserable  hole  as  Chelsea, 
I'd  die  I  "  Lately  a  letter  came  to  me  from  England 
which  mentions  a  village  as  "a  pretty  place  enough, 
but  a  wretched  hole."  So  in  Robert  Elmicic  (Chap. 
XY),  where  a  dila})idated  hamlet  is  described  as  "a 
God-forsaken  hole."  The  truth  is  that  this  common 
unliterary  idiom  is  traditional,  dating  from  time 
immemorial,  and  so  prevalent  was  the  term  once  that 
it  was  even  frequently  added  to  the  proper  names 
of  towns  in  their  derogation,  as  in  the  case  of  Stan- 
gate  Hole,  the  village  in  the  inland  county  of  Hunt- 
ingdonshire, where  the  frightful  murderer  Masham 
was  hanged  in  the  old  time;  or  Limehouse  Hole, 
somewhere  not  far  from  London  ;  and  in  a  quantity 
of  such  instances.  The  use  of  the  word  as  in  Holmes' 
Hole,  ^\^ood's  Hole,  (now  altered  to  HoU,  quite 
needlessly,)  or  the  Hole-in-the-Wall,  is  different,  indi- 
cating here  a  sort  of  running-in  place*  for  vessels,  a 
definition  which  the  lexicographers  are  much  at  fault 
to  make  no  note  of.  But  a]3art  from  these  designa- 
tions are  those  thrown  more  formerW  than  at  ]ires- 
ent  on  mean  or  disliked  places ;  and  Mr.  Ap]ileton 
Morgan  know^s  very  little  of  "English  as  she  is 
spoke"  in  England,  when  he  ventures  to  consider 
"hole"  in  this  sense  merely  modern.  Roget  in  his 
profoundly  learned  Thesaurus^  gives  it  repeatedl\'  as 
indicative  of  a  place,  a  precinct,  an  abode,  an  address, 
a  seat,  a  habitation,  as  it  always  has  been.  Of 
course,  everyone  knows  its  antiquity  as  referring  to 
a  single  dwelling.  "This  worm-eaten  hole,"  says 
Shakespeare,  fleering  at  Warkworth  castle.  Here 
we  have  it  as  denoting  in  the  words  of  Dryden,  "  a 


ME.  DONNELL  7  'S  RE  VIEWERS.  29 

mean  habitation."  Xow,  if  a  Avhole  town  or  city 
was  called  in  the  sixteenth  century  "a  mean  habita- 
tion,'' as  when  King  James'  Bible  terms  Babylon  "a 
habitation  of  dragons,"  I  do  not  see  why  Mr.  Mor- 
gan should  bring  into  question  the  antiquity  of  the 
cipher-English  which  calls  such  a  habitation  a  hole. 
He  continues  his  proof  that  Mr.  Donnelly  is  a 
fraudulent  manufacturer  of  words  in  their  modern 
sense  for  his  cipher,  by  averring  that  "even,"  as  the 
above  cited  paragraph  gives  it,  would  not  be  used  in 
Bacons  day.  Still  further,  that  it  is  doubtful 
whether  it  can  be  found  much  earlier  than  Pope, 
who  says,  "  Here  all  their  rage  and  even  their  mur- 
murs cease ",  this  being  exactly  the  sense  in  Avhich 
the  cipher  employs  it.  He  says  that  Mr.  Donnelly 
uses  it  to  mean  ''likewise,"  etc.,  which  is  obviously 
untrue.  It  is  used  to  carry  the  meaning  of  "as  you 
would  not  have  thought,"  or  "as  you  might  not 
expect,"  the  same  as  it  does  now. 

Let  us  see  how  "even"  was  used  in  Bacon's  day. 
"  Even  that  your  pity  is  enough  to  cure  me." 

Shakespeare  Sonnets,  CXI. 
JVEeaning  "even  3^our  pity."  says  Dr.  Abbott.     Will 
anyone  deny  that  this  is  the  grammatical  equivalent 
of  "even  their  murmurs?"     Then  the  word  does 
occur  earlier  than  Pope,  does  it  not,  Mr.  Morgan  ? 
Here  are  other  instances: 

"O'-  use  all  arts,  or  haunt  all  companies, 
That  may  corrupt  her,  even  in  his  eyes." 

Ben  Jouson :  Underwoods. 
"Mine  eyes  even  seeing  it.'' 

/  Kiugs,  I:  4S, 
"That  thy  trust  may  be  in  the  Lord,.  I  have  made  known 
to  thee  this  day,  even  to  tliee.  ^^^.^^^^^  ^^^^.  ^^^ 

% 


CO  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

Be  it  remcmbei'ed  that  the  transl;vti(>n  in  Avhich 
these  texts  occur  is  contemporarv  Avilh  Lord  F>acon. 
Here  are  some  sentences  from  Sir  Thomas  Browne, 
a  writer,  whose  youth  is  contemporarv  with  J]acon\s 
age,  and  whose  diction  is  so  much  like  one  of  the 
YeruUimian  styles  that  8[)edding  rejects  on  internal 
evidence,  after  due  cogitation,  some  of  Bacon's 
posthumous  essays,  conjecturally  ascribing  them  to 
the  author  of  the  Religio  Medici,  rashly,  I  think, 
for  how  should  any  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne's  manu- 
scripts have  gotten  among  Lord  Bacon's  private 
papers  ?     lie  says: 

"For  when  even  crows  were  funerally  burnt.'" 

Uni  Burial,  Chapter  I. 
*^Eve)i  such  as  hojDC  to  rise  again  would  not  be  content,"  etc. 

Urm  Burial,  Chapter  L. 
"But  even  in  times  of  subjection,"  etc. 

Urn  BurinJ,  Chapter  I. 
"And  even  in  Jutland  and  Cymbrica,  in  Anglia  Sleswick, 
urns  with  bones  were  found,"  etc. 

IJrn  Burial,  Chajjter  II. 

Sir  Thomas  Browne's  writings  are  full  of  this 
idiom. 

To  multiply  these  instances  would  be  easy,  but 
those  giv^en  show  plainly  that  the  sense  in  which 
"even"  is  used  in  the  cipher  narrative,  is  no  more 
modern  than  the  times  of  Elizabeth  and  James. 

It  is  the  same  with  the  word  ''  rumors."  JMr. 
Morgan  says  that  the  word  in  the  sense  given  in  the 
cited  paragraph,  would  not  be  used  in  Bacon's  day, 
Avhen  it  was  alwa\^s  in  the  possessive,  always  per- 
sonified, and  never  pluralized.  Let  us  see  if  this 
accomplished  philologist  speaks  truly: 

"  But  I  can  tell  you  one  thing,  my  lord,  which  I  hear  from 
common  rumors.''''  Timon,  Act  III,  Sc.  2. 


MR.  D  OXNEL  LT'S  RE  VIE  WEES.  31 

Here  is  a  clear  case,  found  in  Shakespeare,  though 
not  known  to  the  ])resident  of  the  Xew  York 
Shakespeare  Society,  where  the  word  is  not  in  the 
possessive,  not  personified,  and  is  distinctly  plural- 
ized  I  And  here  are  otlier  samples,  still  from  Shakes- 
peare : 

''  When  I  came  hither  to  transport  the  tidings 
Which  I  have  heavily  borne,  there  ran  a  rumor. 
Of  many  worthy  fellows  that  were  out." 

MtuMh,  Act  IV.,  Sc.  3. 
"  I  find  the  people  strangely  fautasied, 
Possessed  with  rumors.'''' 

King  John,  Act  IV.  Sc.  2. 

For  a  test  to  prove  the  language  of  the  cipher 
bogus,  great  is  Mr.  Appleton  Morgan's  philology  I 

He  proceeds  to  fresh  triumphs  in  this  direction  by 
citing  the  following  sentence,  given,  he  says,  ''  by 
Mr.  Donnelly  as  written  by  Francis  Lord  Bacon."' 

'■  I  was  in  the  greatest  fear  that  they  would  say 
that  the  image  shown  upon  the  title-leaf  of  his 
volume  was  but  a  mask  to  hide  my  own  face." 

Comment  upon  his  perfectly  ridiculous  and 
utterly  groundless  philological  objection  to  these 
words  is  rendered  unnecessary  by  the  fact  that  no 
such  sentence  is  in  the  cipher,  nor  attributed  to  Lord 
Bacon  anywhere  in  the  book.  False  citations  like 
this  are  what  Montaigne  calls  "  pinching  the  pig  to 
make  him  speak."  However,  "  anything  to  beat 
Grant,"  is  an  axiom  still  in  order.  Mr.  Donnelly 
must  be  vanquished,  and  w^hen  facts  are  wanting, 
let  us  have  inventions.  The  sentence,  it  is  true, 
occurs  in  the  book,  though  not  in  the  cipher,  but  it 
is  purely  su])positive  on  the  part  of  Mr.  Donnell}',  and 
not  ascribed  to  Lord  Bacon  at  all — an   illustration 


SS  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

of  the  sentence  a  reader  mi<^lit  form,  susjiecting 
a  cipher,  when  lie  saw  a  number  of  signilicaut 
words  near  each  otlier  on  a  ])rinted  page ;  and  as 
Mr,  Morgan,  no  matter  what  may  be  liis  defects  m 
philological  knowledge,  knows  how  to  read,  no  one 
was  better  aware  ol'  the  fact  than  he. 

He  continues  the  effort  to  convict  Mr.  Donnelly 
of  forgeries  by  ferreting  out  a  string  of  alleged 
anachronisms,  at  the  character  of  which  the  reader 
cannot  but  marvel.  They  are  the  merest  common- 
places, such  as  might  have  been  uttered  equally  in 
the  seventeenth  or  nineteenth  century,  having  no 
ear-mark  of  style  or  manner  to  denote  the  date  of 
their  origin.  "  The  plays  are  much  admired  and  draw 
great  numbers."  "  The  subjects  are  far  beyond  his 
ability."  "Although  I  am  acquainted  with  him,  I 
would  not  have  known  him,  the  transformation  was 
so  great."  "Ilis  looks  prove  it."  Well!  As  Dr. 
McGlynn  said  of  the  doctrine  of  papal  infallibility, 
"Good  Lord  !  "  Does  ]\Ir.  Morgan  really  expect  any 
one  to  identify  phrases  as  ordinary  as  these  ?  I  could 
bring  him  fift}^  such,  culled  from  the  greatest  Eliza- 
bethan writers,  and  defy  him  to  name  their  century. 
The  fact  is  that  these  citations  look  very  like  a 
trick  on  the  part  of  Mr.  Morgan,  the  suggestion  as 
anachronisms  of  phrases  so  featureless  that  no  one 
can  giv^e  them  the  physiognomy  of  one  time  or 
another,  at  the  same  time  leaving  his  own  defama- 
tory intimation  as  a  quasi-]iroof  of  the  literary 
villany  of  My.  Donnelly. 

lie  goes  on  in  this  direction  by  affecting  to  quote 
from  the  cipher  more  phrases,  which  he  avers 
belong  to   the   language   of  another  age.     One   of 


MR.  DONNEL L  Y  'S  HE  1  'IE WEES.  33 

these  is  "  appearance  of  danger,"  and  comes  from  a 
passage  in  the  book,  decidedly  off-cipher,  given  to 
show,  roughly,  how  under  the  control  of  different 
root-numbers,  the  same  words  contribute  to  three 
different  narratives.  As  Mr.  Donnelly  makes  no 
pretense  to  verbal  accuracy  in  this  passage,  but  ex- 
pressly the  contrary,  it  would  seem  somewhat  high- 
handed to  select  a  phrase  from  it  as  proof  of  philologi- 
cal anachronism.  But  this  Mr.  Morgan  does,  citing 
"appearance  of  danger"  as  unknown  to  I'acon's 
time,  and  therefore  a  forgery  l>y  Mr.  Donnelly. 
Yet  here  is  the  same  idiom  in  Shakespeare  : 

^'Aji/ieifi'diice  of  fancy." 

3fttrh  Ado,  Act  in,  Sc.  2. 

And  here  it  is  in  King  James"*  Bible: 

' '•Afped ranee  oi  fi r e . " 

Numbers:  IX,   15. 

Besides,  if  the  word  "appearance"  in  the  cipher 
'phrase  is  to  be  understood,  which  is  very  possible,  in 
the  sense  of  "probability"  or  "likelihood,"  it  is 
still  a  well-known  idiom  of  Shakespeare's  time,  for 
in  that  sense  Bacon  uses  it  when  he  says,  "  There  is 
that  which  hath  no  appearance'''  Either  way,  Mr. 
Morgan's  assertion  has  no  validity. 

"Had  lied"  is  another  phrase  he  brings  up  for 
the  conviction  of  Mr.  Donnelly.  Here  we  are 
reminded  again  of  Montaigne's  saying,  for  the 
words  are  not  in  the  cipher,  and  once  more  the  pig 
has  been  pinched  to  make  him  speak.  Another 
pinch,  and  we  have  "a  body  of  twenty",  which  is 
also  not  in  the  cipiier.  Pinch  the  pig  again,  and 
he   firives   us  "to  look  for"  in  the    sense  (^f  to  seek 


8J^  MR.  BON  MIL  I. ) '  '^^  11 E 1  IE  1 1 '  ERti. 

for,  another  quotation  Iroiii  an  imaginary  ci|)her 
text.  Mr.  Moi'giin  thinks  it  lair  to  i)res(3nt  these 
fictitious  phi'ases  as  proofs  of  the  ignorance  and 
wickedness  of  the  man  whose  work  he  is  pretending 
to  estimate!  I  offer  the  spectacle  as  a  picture  of 
the  ideal  reviewer. 

He  proceeds  with  the  declai'ation  that  the  phrase 
in  which  the  cipher  mentions  the  failing  Siiakes- 
peare,  "  He  can  not  last  long,"  is  in  '-an  idiom  whicli 
certainl_y  can  not  be  fifty  years  old  in  the  English 
language."  On  the  contrary,  the  very  idiom  occurs 
repeatedly  in  the  plays  and  in  the  other  literature  of 
the  time : 

"The  wonder  is  he  hath  endured  so  Ioikj.'^ 

Leai\  Act  T",  Sc.  3. 

"  A  [dead]  man  ...  he  will  last  you  some  eight  year." 

Hamlet,  Act  V,  Sc.  1. 
"  And  liixt  so,  long  enough." 

Timon,  Act  V,  Sc.  2. 
"Well,  T  can  not  last  ever.'''' 

II Henry,  IV,  Act  I,  Sc.  2. 

"To  be  free  minded  and  cheerfully  disposed  at  hours  of 
meat,  and  of  sleep,  and  of  exercise,  is  one  of  the  best  precepts 
of  long  lasting.'''' — Bacon's  Essays  on  Regimen  of  Hecdtli. 

Next  we  are  instructed  that  the  phrase  "to  flatter 
himself"  was  certainly  not  to  be  found  in  that  age, 
the  allusion  being  to  the  cipher  sentence  "He  is 
flattering  himself  with  the  hope  and  expectation  that 
he  will  get  Avell."  But  in  Shakespeare  we  have ; 
"  Flattering  Jumself  with  project  of  a  power." 

n  Henry  IV,  Act  I,  Sc.  3. 
And  in  King  James'  Bible  we  have: 

"  He  Jlattereth  himself  in  his  own  eyes." 

Psahns  XXXVI:  2. 

The  idiom  in  the  three  cases  is  precisely  the  same. 


MB.  DONNELLY'S  MEVTEWEBS.  S5 

Mr.  3Iorgan*s  finest  feat  in  the  philological  line 
is  perhaps  his  attempt  to  trip  Mr.  Donnelly  on  the 
phrase  of  the  Bishop  of  "Worcester  in  the  cipher  con- 
cerning Shakspere's  age — "  A.lthough  he  is  not  yet 
thirtv-three."  Here  he  lets  one  see  he  has  him  foul ! 
Nobody  in  that  age,  he  declares,  would  say  "thirty- 
three,"  and  the  sentence  is  a  manifest  forgery.  *' Ask 
an  Englishman  to-day,"'  says  this  unerring^ detective, 
"  how  old  a  man  is  of  the  age  indicated  in  the  last 
sentence,  and  he  will  tell  you — not  thirty-three,  but 
three  and  thirty ;  and  I  can  not  trace  a  time  in  the 
history  of  English  vmen  a  contrary  rule  ohtainedr 
Can  not,  indeed  !     What   does  Mr.  Morgan  sa\'  to 

this: 

"Hast  thou  any  grene  cloth,  said  our  Ivjnge, 
That  thou  wilt  sell  nov-e  to  me? 
Ye,  for  God,  sayd  Eobyu, 

Thirty  yerdes  and  tJwee.^'' 

A  Lyfell  Geste  of  Rohyn  Ilode:     Ritaon. 

It  appears  that  Englishmen  did  not  always  say 
"three  and  thirty,"  but  quite  as  often  "thirty  and 
three."  Here  is  more  evidence  of  similar  liberty, 
datino;  from  the  fourteenth  centurv. 

''  In  Jerusalem  he  reigned  tldrty-threc  years  and  a  half." 

Sir  John  MandeviUe,  Cliap.  VI. 

"  He  was  thirty-three  years  and  three  months  old." 

Sir  John  ManderiUe,  Chap.   VII. 

"Our  Lady was  conversant  with  her  son  thirty-three 

years  and  three  months." 

Sir  John  MandeviUe,  Chap.  X. 

Yet  Mr.  Morgan  '•'  can  not  trace  a  time  in  the 
history  of  English  "  when  people  did  not  say  "  three 
and  thirty  "  instead  of  '>  thirty-three  !  " 


SG  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

If  ho  were  as  conversant  wlili  the  j^lays  as  one 
would  naturally  expect  the  Grand  Copht  of  a  Shakes- 
peare society  to  be,  he  would  know  that  the  great 
dramatist  himself  did  not  always,  or  even  usually, 
put  the  cai't  before  the  horse  in  these  constructions. 

For  example : 

"  Whom  thou  obeyedst  thirty  and  six  years  " 

;.  3  nenry  VL,  Act  III,  Sc.  3. 

"Toad  that  under  the  cohl  stone 

Daj's  and  night  hast  thirty-one.^'' 

Macbeth,  Act  IV  Sc.  1. 

*'  I  have  years  on  my  hack,  foi'ty -eight.'''' 

Lear,  Act  /,  Sc.  4. 

"  lie  had  before  this  last  expedition,  twenty-Jire  y^onnds  uj^on 

him  Now  it"  ticenty-seven.'''' 

'*  Coriolanus,  Act  11,  Sc.  1. 

"  I  have  known  thee  these  tventy-nine  years.'''' 

%  Henry  IV,  Act  II,  Sc.  4. 

"  Twenty-Jive  years  have  I  but  gone  in  travail."    , 

Comedy  of  Errors,  Act  V,  Sc.  3. 

*'  Were  I  but  twenty -one, 

Your  father's  image  is  so  bit  in  you  — 

His  very  air — that  I  should  call  you  brother." 

Winter's  Tale,  Act  F,  Sc.  2. 

"Methought  I  did  recoil 

Twenty-three  years. " 

Winter's  Tale,  Act  I,  Sc.  2. 

Of  course,  Shakespeare,  whoever  he  was,  might 
have  said,  and  would  have  properly  said,  if  he  had 
chosen,  six  and  thirty,  one  and  thirty,  eight  and 
forty,  five  and  twenty,  etc.,  instead  of  the  locutions 
cited,  but  it  was  optional  with  him,  as  it  was  with 
Englishmen  before  and  after  him,  and  the  way  he 
used  his  option  forms  a  fatal  bar  of  precedent  to  the 
accusation  Mr.  Morgan  brings  against  the  Donnelly 
cipher  in  this  particular. 


MB.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  37 

His  final  effort  to  invalidate  the  cipher  text,  anc] 
fix  a  mean  crime  on  Mr.  Donnelly,  is  probably  the 
smallest  thing  he  has  drme  in  tlie  philological  line, 
and  certainly  not  the  least  disastrons  to  himself  as  a 
critic.  Professing  to  quote  from  the  cipher,  he  finds 
"  bitter  beer"  as  one  item  of  the  supper  at  Stratford, 
and  asks  skepticall}^  "  was  there  such  a  thing  as 
'  bitter  beer '  ^ "  As  there  was  beer  called  "  sweet," 
of  course,  the  other  beer  was  discriminated  as  "bit- 
ter." The  discrimination  continues  to  this  day,  and  in 
England,  I  am  told,  you  constantly  hear  of  "  bitter 
beer."  In  one  of  our  popular  song-books,  years  ago, 
there  was  a  catch  with  the  doggerel  lines : 

*'  We'll  drink  Bass  and  Allsop's 
C41orious  bitter  beer." 

All  this,  however,  is  of  no  consequence  bej^ond 
showing  how  little  equipment  Mr.  Morgan  has  for 
his  self-chosen  task  of  defamatory  criticism,  the  true 
point  being  that  this  is  the  closing  instance  of  pinch- 
ing the  pig  to  make  him  speak,  and  arousing  squawk 
we  get  from  him.  The  quotation  is  a  sheer  manu- 
facture. Tliere  is  nothing  about  bitter  beer  in  the 
cipher.     The  phrase  used  is  "bottle-ale." 

Later  it  came  out  that  while  Mr.  Morgan  pro- 
fessed in  his  World  article  to  cite  from  the  cipher, 
he  was  really  citino;  from  a  letter  Mr.  Donnelly  had 
written  him  long  before,  in  which,  I  presume,  no 
eff'ort  had  been  made  to  give  the  exact  cryptic 
language.  The  reader  will  admire  the  ingenuous- 
ness of  this  proceeding,  especially  when  nice  points 
of  philology  were  involved,  depending  upon  precise 
terms.  A  month  after  the  book  was  published,  lie 
appeared  in  the  June  Shali:esj)ereana,  correcting  his 


38  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

false  citation  to  read  "  bottle-ale,"  and  carelesslv  ob- 
serving,  as  though  it  were  of  no  consequence,  that 
he  had  not  obtained  it  from  the  book  he  had  l)een 
reviewing.  He  then  charged  that  IVIr.  Donnellv  had 
made  an  alteration  in  the  cipher  since  he  wrote  the 
letter,  offering  not  tlie  slightest  evidence  in  su})poi't 
of  this  assertion;  and  further  that  he  had  "  laid 
one  question  but  o})cned  up  another,  namely:  Was 
there  any  ale  in  bottles  in  those  days?"  Ale  was 
home-brewed  everywhere,  he  says,  not  stowed  away, 
nor  exported.  "  Why  should  it  have  been  brought 
upon  Shakespeare's  table  in  bottles?  "  Still  harping 
on  the  cipher,  you  see  !  He  will  not  allow  the  ]nib- 
lio  to  believe  that  Mr.  Donnelly,  is,  even  on  one 
point,  anything  but  a  forger  of  documents. 

Nevertheless,  there  vxts  "l)ottle-ale"  in  those 
days,  as  people  know  who  are  not  so  silly  and  ill- 
read  as  to  raise  a  question  about  it.  Here  is  one 
reference  to  it  among  manv  : 

"Everyone  that  cuii  frame  a  booke  in  rime,  tlioiigh  it  bo 
but  in  commendation  of  copper  noses  or  lot  tie  ale,  will  catch 
atthe  garlande  due  to  ])oets.'" 

Wehlies  Discourse  of  Enr/lish  Poetrie,  1586. 

Here  afi-ain  the  President  of  the  New  York  Shakes- 
peare  society's  lack  of  familiarity  with  the  pages  of 
the  Shakespeare  drama,  kept  from  his  knowledge 
further  instances,  which  would  have  prevented  him 
from  publicly  doubting  the  existence  of  Elizabethan 
ale  in  bottles.     As  thus: 

"  The  Myrmidons  are  no  hottle-ale  houses." 

Twelfth  NUjM,  Act  II,  Sc.  3. 

And  again  : 

"What a  beard  of  the  general's  cut,  and   a   horrid  suit  of  the 

camp,  w\\\  do  ?Lva.ongfoaminrjlottles  and  ale-washed  wits  is 

wonderful  to  be  thought  of." 

Henri/  V,  Act  III,  Sc.  8. 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  39 

And  finally,  (it  is  hoped  that  no  indignant  Bacon- 
ian will  utter  the  line  with  signilicance,) 

"Away  you  lottle-ale  rascal !" 

2  JL'iD'i/IV,  ActLL,Sr.4:. 

The  vain  of  philological  learning  -with  which  Mr. 
Morgan  has  been  fertilizing  the  public  mind,  drib- 
bles away  here  into  a  few  scattering  drops.  One 
is  that  the  cipher  sentence,  "His  purse  is  well 
lined  with  the  gold  he  receives  from  the  plays," 
"does  not  sound  like  Baconian  or  Jacobean  English." 
"Does  not  56>?«i6?,"  indeed.  A  rare  touchstone  for 
a  student  of  language.  To  Ime  a  coffer,  a  pocket,  a 
purse  with  gold,  occurs  constantly  in  seventeenth- 
centur}'-  English.  "What  if  I  do  line  one  of  their 
hands  ?"  says  Shakespeare.  "I  to  line  my  Christmas 
coffers,"  says  Massinger.  "  When  thou  feelcst  thy 
purse  well  lined,"  says  Ratsei.  But  bne  need  not 
linger  on  such  trivia,  which  simply  show  Mr.  Mor- 
gan's remarkable  ignorance  of  his  subject.  The  only 
point  worth  notice  in  tliis  part  of  his  article  is  his 
muddy-headed  effort  to  catch  Mr.  Donnelly  in  an 
anachronism  showing  fraud.  It  appears  by  the 
cipher  that  the  Bishop  of  Worcester  wrote  a  letter 
to  Cecil,  about  Shakespeare,  in  which  he  reports,  "It 
is  thought  he  will  buy  all  the  land  apjuirtenant  to 
Xew  Place."  Now  this,  savs  Mr.  Mormm,  could  not 
possibl}'  have  been  inserted  in  cipher  in  the  Henry  lY 
quartos  of  1598-1600,  norinthefolio  of  1623,  because 
Shakespeare  had  already  bought  the  land  at  New 
Place  a  year  or  two  prior  to  the  date  of  the  first 
quarto.  Hence,  Mr.  Donnelly  has  forged  the  sentence 
and  is  to  be  held  up  to  public  derision.  But  what  was 
the  date  of  the  Bltihoi)'s  letter  to  Cecil  f    Oh ,  no  matter  I 


J^0  MR.  B  ONNELL  T'S  RE  VIE  WERS. 

Admirable  reasoncr.  Boiled  down  to  a  sino-le 
allspice,  Mr.  Morgan's  point  is  just  this,  Bacon  could 
not  have  i)ut  the  sentence  into  a  cipher  in  the  quartos 
of  1598-1000,  or  the  folio  of  1623,  because  the 
Bishop  of  Worcester  wrote  his  letter  to  Cecil  prior 
to  Shakespeare's  making  the  purchase  in  1507. 
Peerless  logician ! 

V. 

An  additional  proof  that  there  is  really  no  cipher 
in  the  text,  and  that  the  one  presented  is  entirely 
spurious  and  made  by  Mr.  Donnelly,  is  the  fact,  says 
Mr.  Morgan,  that  it  does  not  resemble  any  of  Lord 
Bacon's  acknowledged  works;  and  ho  asks  with 
crushing  foi'ce,  "Does  the  cipher  narrative  remind 
us  of  the  Asm^s,  or  of  the  Novum  Organum^  or  of 
the  De  Augmentis  ?  "     Why  let  us  see : 

"Atque  quemadmodum  sccta;  conditorcs  non  sumus,  ita 
nee  openim  paiticularium  largitories  aut  promissores." 

— Novum  Organum,  CXVII. 
Certainly  the  difference  between  the  style  of  the 
cipher  and  tlie  Novuvi  Organutn  is  obvious,  and  the 
parallel  is  discouraging;  but  let  us  look  further: 

"  Urbes  munitte  plena  armamentaria  equorum  jiropagincs 
generossc,  currus  armati,  elcphanti,  macliinaj  atque  tormenta 
bellica  omnigena,  etsimilia,"  etc. — Be  Augmcrdu. 

It  appears  we  fare  no  better  with  the  De  Aucj- 
mentls,  and  must  in  all  frankness  admit  that  the  sim- 
ple English  of  the  cipher  story  does  not  "  remind  us" 
of  Bacon's  rolling  and  resounding  Latin.  As  for  the 
^5.sa?/5,  their  matter  is  quite  matched  by  their  art; 
they  are  studiously  apothegmic,  almost  gnomic,  in 
their  construction  ;  and  the  reader  must  concede  to 
Mr.  Morgan    that   the   cipher  is   not   cast   in  their 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  4I 

mold.  But  who  but  a  genius  Jike  him  would 
require  that  it  should  be,  or  demand  that  an  English 
style  should  tally  with  a  Latin  ?  Had  he  sought  to 
bring  into  the  comparison  Lord  Bacon's  AjMhegms, 
or  some  of  his  somewhat  stiff  and  ineloquent  private 
letters,  or  even  certain  paragraphs  of  his  History  of 
Ilenrij  Vll.^  there  might  be  some  sense  in  it,  but  he 
advances  the  plain  tale  of  the  cryptograph,  sets  it 
against  the  powerful  rhetoric,  cast  for  eternity,  of 
three  of  Bacon's  greatest  works,  and  asks,  with 
bland  simplicity,  wliether  the  one  "  reminds  "  us  of 
the  others.  This  is  truly  pastoral,  and  what  Mr. 
Morgan  wants  is  a  broad  hat  of  plaited  straw,  blue 
ribbons,  a  crook,  and  some  sheep.  One  would  tliink  ' 
that  the  fact  would  have  occurred  to  him  that  the 
cipher  story  must  necessarily  have  been  seriously 
cramped  by  having  to  move  in  the  shackles  of  the 
outer  text,  and  that  this  condition  alone  would  have 
prevented  any  great  effects  of  style,  or  resemblance 
to  any  rhetorical  masterpiece.  The  greatest  artist 
in  language,  set  to  move  in  the  interior  of  a  grand 
play  with  a  cipher  narrative,  would  find  that  he  had 
to  perform  a  fetter-dance  of  singular  difficulty.  But 
Mr.  Morgan  sees  nothing  of  all  this,  and  rolls  off 
with  complacency  his  shallow  guff  about  the  want 
of  "parallel"  between  a  necessaiily  restricted  and 
labored  secret  text,  and  the  mighty,  untrammeled 
diction  of  the  Novum  Orgamim. 

"Whether  ilie  manner  of  tlie  cipher  does  not 
coincide  with  Lord  Bacon's  more  than  the  critic 
imagines,  is  a  question  which  need  not  be  entered 
upon.  The  immediate  concern  is  with  Mr,  Morgan's 
critical  exploits,  the  next  of  which  is  quite  worthy  of 


^  MR  DONNELL  Y  'S  BE  VIE  WEES, 

all  that  precede  it.  Keeping  in  view  the  destruction 
of  Mr.  Donnelly's  book,  he  goes  on  to  declare  that 
the  great  folio  of  1623  is  not  authentic!  Here 
is  a  book  put  forward  as  a  magnum  ojjus — the  first 
collected  edition  of  plays  then  famous  with  the  pub- 
lic; a  book  which  at  once  mounted  to  supremacy,  and 
so  kept  it  that  a  perfect  copy  of  it  to-day  is  worth 
$5,000 ;  a  book  on  which  we  rely  for  our  f  idlest 
knowledge  of  its  author's  works,  containing,  as  Mr. 
Morgan  himself  says,  several  of  the  ])lays  never 
heard  of  until  its  publication  ;  and  Mr.  Morgan 
declares  it  is  not  authentic,  and  gives  this  as  a  reason 
why  Lord  Bacon  would  never  have  chosen  it  as  a 
place  of  concealment  for  his  cipher  narrative  !  What 
place  should  he  have  chosen  ?  The  "  stolen  and 
surreptitious  copies  ?"  The  scattered  quartos?  The 
absurdity  of  this  position  has  never  been  excelled. 
It  is  obvious  that  whether  the  first  folio  were 
''authentic"  or  not,  it  would  have  been  a  sufficient 
depository  for  Lord  Bacon's  secret  history,  if  only 
because  it  was  unique,  famous,  and  assured  of  popu- 
lar permanence,  as  it  has  proved  to  be.  Another 
palpable  absurdity  Mr.  Morgan  commits,  in  liis  zeal 
to  impugn  Mr.  Donnelly's  veracity,  is  to  assert  that,  if 
Bacon  chose  the  folio  for  his  cover,  he  Avould  have 
been  careful  to  have  the  text  exact  —  free  from  inter- 
polations, which,  he  says,  it  is  not.  What  has  the 
purity  of  the  text  to  do  with  its  capacity  for  enfold- 
ing a  secret  reading  ?  Manifestly  nothing.  In  fact, 
it  appears  that  in  certain  cases  the  corruption  of  the 
text  is  caused  by  the  exigencies  of  the  cipher. 
Moreover,  it  is  clear  enough  that  some  of  these 
impurities   which  Mr.    Morgan   considers    "  actors' 


MR.  D ONNELL  Y'S  RE  VIE WERS.  43 

interpolations,-'  are  so  only  in  his  own  fancy.     For 
example,  the  folio  gives  in  Lea}\i\\c,  following  lines: 

"  Pray  do  not  mocke  mc, 

I  am  a  very  foolish,  fond  old  man, 

Four  score  and  upwards, 

Not  an  hour  more  or  less; 

And  to  deal  plainly, 

I  fear  I  am  not  in  my  perfect  mind. " 
The  line  in  italics  Mr.  Morgan  thinks  an  actor's 
interpolation,  adding  that  the  author  would  never  have 
put  it  there,  because  it  is  incoherent  and  makes  the 
other  lines  ridiculous  by  impairing  their  pathos.  But 
it  is  at  once  a  question,  w^th  the  reader,  whether  this 
incoherence  is  not  in  perfect  keeping  with  Lear's 
w^eak  and  w^andering  mental  condition  ;  and  this  is 
comfirmed  by  his  immediate  misgiving  in  the  next 
lines,  where  he  seems  to  feel  that  what  he  has  just 
said  is  nonsense,  and  fears  that  he  is  not  in  his  per- 
fect mind.  A  stroke  of  genius  like  this  flickering 
lapse  from  noble  pathos  to  pitiable  incongruity,  is 
not  usually  characteristic  of  actors'  interpolations. 
Kor  is  it  at  all  clear  that  the  speech  of  Falstaff  in 
the  Merry  Wives,  -^vhere  he  prays  "  God  bless  me 
from  that  Welsh  fairy!"  is  a  bit  of  actor's  burlesque. 
Mr.  Morgan's  misreading  here  is  really  amazing. 
Falstaff,  crouched  in  the  fern  around  Heme's  oak, 
sees  the  company  enter,  with  their  pretty  twinkling- 
tapers,  disguised  as  fairies.  Evans,  the  Welshman? 
one  of  them,  speaks  his  lines,  and  Falstaff,  not  recog- 
nizing him,  but  hearing  his  Welsh  accent,  naturally 
in  his  scared  and  bewildered  condition,  thinks  him 
a  Welsh  fairy,  and  delivers  himself  accordingly. 
Could  anything  be  plainer?  Yet  Mr.  Morgan  must 
find  this,  like  the  otiier,  an    instance    of   "changes 


U  MR.  D ONNEL LY'8  HE  VIE  WEIiS. 

made  by  players/'  spurred  against  reason,  by  his 
desire  to  make  out  that  Mr.  Donnelly  is  a  cheat 
and  a  liar ! 

The  same  motive  drives  him  into  the  attempt  to 
establish  that  the  i)lays  must  have  been  written  by 
an  actor,  (Shakespeare)  ;  and  that  therefore  Mr. 
Donnelly  is  without  his  prime  basis,  because  the 
histrionic  profession  arrays  itself  solidly,  by  instinct, 
against  the  Baconian  theory.  Actors  themselves, 
he  declares,  are  never  Baconians.  Mr.  Morgan  is 
mistaken.  Charlotte  Cushman  was  a  Baconian  ;  and 
donl)tless,  if  ITio  matter  were  looked  into,  there 
would  be  found  others.  But  Miss  Cushman  was  not 
only  a  great  actor — in  certain  roles  of  comedy,  as 
in  As  You  Like  It^  or  the  Jealous  Wife,  never 
excelled  by  anyone — but  she  was  also  a  woman  of 
wide  culture,  and  of  a  strong  and  scholarly  intellect. 
This  enabled  her  to  study  the  plays  by  lights  which 
the  very  profession  of  most  actors  excludes,  and  to 
which  as  a  class,  their  whole  training  and  experience 
are  foreign.  What  is  there  in  the  discipline  of 
actors,  as  such,  to  make  them  critical  umpires  of  a 
vast  and  difficult  literary  question,  like  that  of  the 
origin,  purpose  and  relation  of  the  Shakespeare 
plays?  AVho  made  them  judges?  Their  business  is 
strictly  and  purely  personation;  to  act,  and  to  study 
to  act,  by  mastering  the  means  which  magnetic  elo- 
cution, delivery  and  presence  offer  far  the  moving  of 
the  mind  and  soul.  It  is  a  great  function;  how 
great  the3r  know  best  in  our  generation  who  have 
been  transported  by  Henry  Placideor  William  War- 
ren in  comedy,  or  electrified  by  the  elder  Booth  or 
Bachel   in    tragedy.     But    it   is   not    allied   to  the 


MR.  DOXNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  45 

function  of  criticism.  When  I  think  of  some  actors  I 
have  seen  or  known — sterling  old  John  Gilbert,  a 
great  star  who  has  never  starred,  sound  as  oak  in 
sense  and  judgment;  Forrest,  matchless  in  his  subtle 
comprehension  of  the  meaning  of  his  text;  that 
majestic  elder  Booth,  just  named,  whose  intuitions 
were  as  broad  and  bright  as  tropic  lightning ;  that 
incomparable  Kachel,  also  named,  less  a  woman  than 
a  sibyl  in  her  intelligence;  Coquelin,  whose  writing 
alone,  notably  his  recent  fine  appreciation  of  the 
lyric  beauty  and  grandeur  of  Victor  Hugo's  genius, 
shows  an  intellect  of  no  common  scope  and  deli- 
cacy ;  the  incomparable  William  Warren,  Hackett, 
the  two  Placides,  Burton,  Henry  Irving — when  I 
think  of  them,  or  their  few  equals,  I  could  almost 
regard  them  competent  to  express  as  wise  a  judg- 
ment, by  native  insight,  on  the  true  authorship  of  the 
Shakespeare  plan's  as  did  their  peer,  Charlotte  Cush- 
man.  Still  the  trust  would  be  hazardous,  :^r  they 
would  be  off  their  beat,  and  as  actually  as  though 
the  problem  were  one  of  astronomy.  If  one  would 
be  warned  of  what  might  be  expected  in  such  a  field 
from  the  ordinai-y  run  of  actors,  let  him  consult  the 
article  by  Lawrence  Barrett,  Concerning  Shakesj)earc, 
in  the  JVorfh  American  Revieio,  of  last  December. 
Mr.  Barrett  is  an  actor  of  talent,  representing  a  high 
average  of  his  profession,  and  stands  eminent  in 
popular  esteem.  But  no  one  fairly  conversant  with 
the  literature  of  the  Bacon-Shakespeare  controversy, 
or  with  literature  at  all,  can  read  his  contribution 
without  amused  disdain.  To  his  apprehension,  the 
whole  enquiry  is  nothing  ..but  an  emanation  of  the 
literary   skepticism    and     "blind    irreverence"    of 


40  Mil.  D ONNELL  T'S 'HE  VIE  WERS. 

which,  he  says,  Huxley,  Darwin  and  Tyndall  have 
proved  the  forerunners!  Tliis  stroke  of  judgment 
would  make  a  cat  laugh,  since  it  is  notoriously 
kuDwn  that  our  fruitful  modern  criticism  began,  (at 
least  since  it  ceased  to  be  subterranean),  with  Vol- 
taire and  the  Encyclopedists  ;  and  continued  with  the 
mighty  breed  of  Germans,  likeNiebuhr,  Avho  revised 
the  old  statements  and  made  them  conform  to  sense 
and  fact,  long  before  Huxley,  Darwin  and  Tyndall 
were  born.  As  for  the  startling  anomaly,  the  down- 
right contradiction,  between  Shakespeare's  personal 
record  and  his  reputed  works,  which  staggered  Guizot, 
Ilallam,  Schlegel,  Coleridge,  Emerson  and  a  host  of 
perfectly  orthodox  scholars,  he  appears  to  be  entirely 
oblivious  of  it ;  a  slight  lack,  one  would  think,  to  any 
proper  consideration  of  the  question.  All  through  the 
article,  even  from  the  start,  Bacon  i§  for  him  the 
impossible  monster  Pope  invented  and  the  world 
never  saw: — "the  wisest,  brightest,  meanest  of  man- 
kind;"— and  to  think  of  him  as  the  author  of  the'plays, 
is,  to  his  mind,  simply  reason  gone  to  seed  in  folly. 
A  notable  feature  is  the  biographical  sketch  he 
gives  of  Shakespeare,  bald  as  the  head  of  Martin  Van 
Buren,  and  leaving  out  all  the  incidents  that  would 
make  it  graphic,  possibly  because  they  would  also 
make  it  discreditable.  The  story  of  the  outrageous 
and  wanton  trespass,  which  no  owner  of  a  country 
estate  would  endure,  any  more  than  did  Sir  Thomas 
Lucy  ;  the  traditions  and  proofs  of  his  coarse  amours, 
his  drunkenness,  his  greed,  his  usury  ;  his  parvcmi, 
ambitions  ;  his  attempt  to  wring  from  the  hard  hands 
of  peasants  their  poor  landed  rights  ;  his  impudent 
and  dishonest  efforts  to  obtain  armorial  bearings. 


MR.  DONXELLT'S  REVIEWERS.  /,7 

are  all  omitted.  Tlie  only  salient  j^oint  is  that  Mrs. 
Shakespeare,  who  survived  her  lord,  put  up  the 
monument  to  his  memory  in  Stratford  church.  (For 
a  bold  bouncer,  this  takes  the  cake  and  bears  the 
bell.)  To  the  present  day,  it  is  an  utter  mystery  who 
erected  tlie  monument,  with  the  bust  on  top.  which 
the  great  sculptor,  Chantrey,  thought,  by  certain 
tokens,  was  carven  from  a  death-mask ;  witli  the  two 
little  cherubs,  one  blowing  a  trump  of  fame,  or  hold- 
ing an  inverted  torch  (I  forget  which),  the  other 
pointing  downward  with  a  spade;  and  with  the 
tributary  inscriptions,  one  of  them  in  Latin,  in  which 
the  poet  is  compared  to  Nestor,  Socrates  and  Virgil. 
But  this  oracular  actor  states  that  it  was  Mrs. 
Shakespeare  that  did  it — states  it,  too,  with  careless 
assurance  as  sometljing  always  known.  "The  facts 
am  false",  averred  the  colored  orator;  and  there  are 
a  great  number  of  positions,  assumptions  and  asser- 
tions in  Mr.  Barrett's  article,  to  which  the  expression 
is  applicable.  He  seems  quite  imbued,  rightly 
enough,  with  the  idea  of  Shakespeare's  personal  illit- 
eracy or  scant  education ;  but,  therefore,  in  defer- 
ence to  his  fetish,  he  thinks  it  necessarj'  to  assume 
the  most  supercillious  attitude  toward  learning  as  a 
correlative  of  genius.  Scholarship,  he  thinks,  has 
never  been  the  concomitant  of  creative  literature, 
though  he  could  be  safely  defied  to  show  a  single 
pt)et  or  author,  of  the  first  magnitude,  antique  or 
modern,  who  was  not  a  scholar  also.  It  is  in  this 
connection  that  he  actually  has  the- fatuity  to  ad- 
vance the  notion  that  the  mio-htv  Eschvlus,  and  his 
almost  comjieers,  Sophocles  and  Euri])ides,  were  less 
in  attainment  than  Plato,     lie   tacitly,  and   even 


4B  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

more  than  tacitly,  assumes  the  unlettered  condition 
of  Shakespeare,  scornfully  saying  in  this  general 
relation,  "  Colleges  do  not  create  poets  ; ",  and  then 
glorifies  Moliere,  who,  he  seems  to  imply,  was  one  of 
the  same  kind;  leaving  his  readers  with  the  impres- 
sion that,  like  Shakespeare,  lie  Avas  all  genius  and  no 
learning.  He  forgets  that  Moliere  was  thoroughl\- 
educated  at  Clermont,  then  one  of  tlie  finest  colleges 
in  Europe;  was  also  the  special  pupil  of  the  great 
philosopher  Gassendi ;  and  was  afterward  for  some 

i  years  a  student  of  law.  He  ought  to  know  that 
there  is  no  parallel  in  educational  proficiency  be- 
tween this  actor  and  the  one  of  the  Globe  Theatre, 

.  at  whom  "  Rye.  Qu3'ne3%"  in  liis  life-time,  spat 
the  jeering  epithets,  '■'•  Ilistr'io!  wiiiHi!^''  But 
the  crowning  enormity  of  this  grotesque  article, 
by  a  flower  of  the  pi'ofession,  is  the  unseemh^ 
manner  in  which  its  author  permits  himself  to  speak 
of  Lord  Bacon.  He  ignores,  if  he  ever  knew  with 
what  adoring  ardor,  what  glowing  veneration.  Bacon 
was  regarded  by  that  very  Gassendi,  the  illustrious 
master  of  his  revered  Moliere,  whose  old  French 
ej'^es  would  have  blazed  with  noble  anger,  could  he 
have  heard  one  he  knew  to  be  good  and  great  so 
foully  vilified.  The  histrionic  reviewer  needs  to  be 
told  that  his  censure  is  as  unfitting  as  unmannerly, 
for,  even  should  the  varied  infamy  charged  on  Bacon 
be  proved,  as  it  never  has  been,  he  would  still  reimtin 
a  majestic  man  ;  still  remain,  even  then,  in  the  words 
of  Browning,  our  "  spirit's  arbiter,  magnificent  in 
sin ; "    and,   whatever  the  disclosures,  never  would 

I    deserve,  as  Mr.  Barrett  says,  "  immortal  contempt  as 

j    his  portion."     The  tone  adopted  toward  Bacon  is  as 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  4^ 

sopbomorical  as  it  is  ferocious  and  diracefsgiil,  and 
shows  how  ignorant  the  critic  is  of  his  subject,  and 
of  the  results  of  recent  inv^estigation.  When  he 
mentions  "that  withering  denunciation  of  Lord 
Macaula}^  which  will  cling  to  Bacon  when  the 
Shakespeare  mj'th  is  f£)rgotten,"lie  makes  it  evident 
that  he  has  not  got  far  enough  in  his  knowledge  to 
know  that  the  denunciations  of  the  unscrupulous 
Scotch  sophist  are  not  much  for  clinging,  especially 
among  well-read  Americans.  He  has  apparently 
never  heard  of  Hepworth  Dixon,  who,  on  this  sub- 
ject, laid  out  both  Lord  Campbell  and  Macaulay 
uncommonly  cold.  He  seems  to  have  never  read 
the  J^venings  with  a  Revieicei\  that  work  in  which 
the  illustrious  Spedding,  a  pedestrian  mind,  not 
talaria-ankled,  not  "  clinquant,  all  in  gold,"  like 
Macaulay,  but  slow",  sure,  terrible  in  the  possession 
of  his  patient  research,  and  in  his  unflawed  veracity, 
and  perfect  candor,  plods  on,  like  Zisca  in  the  battle 
with  his  scythe,  mowing  down  the  host  of  verbal 
tricics  and  lies  arraj^ed  against  Bacon,  and  destroy- 
ing forever  the  historic  credit  of  the  shameless 
defamer  of  William  Penn,  who  also  blackened  the 
fame  of  the  greatest  of  Englishmen.  If  Mr.  Barrett 
had  read  these  books  he  would  then  have  been  only 
in  the  beginning  of  knowledge,  but  he  would  have 
learned  enough  to  know  that  Bacon  was  never  false 
to  Essex  —  that  violent  and  turbulent  young  man, 
long  estranged  from  his  great  guide,  who  sank  from 
his  noble  early  promise  into  the  life  of  a  dissolute 
libertine,  broke  out  at  last  into  a  selfish  and  blood v 
treason,  and  meanly  sacrificed,  when  doomed,  the 
wretched  comrades  whom  he  had  led  into  his  bad 


60  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEW  BUS. 

enterprise.  He  would  have  learned  further  that 
Bacon  never  corrupted  justice  as  Chancellor,  every 
one  of  his  decisions  being  unrevoked  by  the  very 
Parliament  that  ruined  him,  and  standino-  intact  to 
this  day;  that  he  never,  not  in  a  single  instance, 
took  bribes,  but  only  the  I'eeg  and  free  gifts  apper- 
taining to  his  office,  which  he  was  expected  to  take ; 
which  stood  as  make- weight  to  its  petty  salary ;  and 
which  Sir  Thomas  More  and  every  Chancellor  took, 
unimpeached,  before  him;  that  he  never,  as  Mr. 
Barrett  declares, — parroting  the  brilhant  knave, 
Macaulay, — "  favored  torture,"  but  in  the  very  case 
of  Peacham  referred  to,  opposed  it,  being  simply 
present,  under  protest,  as  a  subordinate  member  of 
the  council  that  examined  the  poor  miscreant;  and 
that  he  never,  either  by  character  or  action,  merited 
the  vile  insolence  thrown  npon  him  by  this  theat- 
rical popinjay  when  he  calls  him  the  ''meanest  of 
mankind."  Mr.  Barrett's  essay,  in  fine,  does  not 
sustain  Mr.  Morgan's  notion  that  actors,  as  such,  are 
competent  to  utter  judgment  on  the  authorship  of 
the  plays.  Its  miserable  farrago  of  toadying  plati- 
tudes, sophomoric  invective,  misstatement,  suppi-es- 
sion  in  consequence  and  ignorance,  and  can  never  win 
a  deeper  tribute  than  a  sardonic  smile  from  the 
ordinary  well-read  reader; — a  reader  who  will  close 
his  perusal  with  a  curling  lip,  and  perchance  remem- 
ber the  superb  and  savage  gibe  Junius  flung  at  the 
actor  Garrick,  "  Keep  to  your  pantomimes,  you 
vagabond !  " 

VI. 
Mr.   Morgan   labors  to  prove  that  the   dramas 
could  not  have  been  written  by   Bacon,  because  of 
their  manifest  adaptability  in  action  to  the  stage ; 


ME.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  51 

because,  in  his  own  words,  "  they  are  too  evidently 
'  the  work  of  a  practical  inventor  of  pla3^s."  I  remem- 
ber reading  an  article  ten  years  ago  by  Julius  Ben- 
edix,  a  distinguished  German  authority,  the  author 
of  over  thirty  dramas,  so  successful  that  several  of 
them  have  been  translated  into  other  languages,  and 
himself  the  practical  manager  of  several  leading- 
German  theaters;  and  he  demonstrated  beyond 
cavil  that  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  playwright, 
the  dramas  of  Shakespeare  violate  the  requirements 
of  the  stage  in  every  ])articular.  The  proof  of  their 
relative  unhtness  for  representation,  and  of  their  not, 
therefore,  having  originated  in  the  brain  of  a  dra- 
matic manager,  is  found  in  the  fact  that  some  of  them 
are  never  acted,  and  all  the  others,  without  excep- 
tion, exist  only  for  the  theatre  in  a  stage  edition, 
abridged,  altered  and  excised,  often  in  the  most 
radical  manner.  So  much  for  Mr.  Morgan's  idea 
that  theii-  structure  shows  that  they  must  have  been 
written  by  an  actor.  Besides,  the  argument  proves 
too  much:  —  nothing  less  than  that  all  successful 
dramas  must  have  had  actors  for  their  authors, 
which  is  notoriously  untrue.  Is  there  anything 
finer  than  the  elder  Dumas'  Lady  of  Belle  Islel 
Are  not  Yictor  Hugo's  plays,  Ilernani,  Ruy  Bias 
and  the  others,  almost  incomparable  for  stage  effect, 
as  for  ideal  picturesqueness  and  beauty ''.  What 
play  better  keeps  the  stage  for  its  acting  merits, 
than  Bulwer's  Richelieu i  So  with  a  hundred  in- 
stances. But  the  authors  were  not  actors.  The 
idea  is  simple  folly. 

Such  is  the  kind  of  article  relied  on  to  damage  or 
destrov  Mr.  Donnellv's  book,  and  sent  uut  to  many 


52  MR.  DONNELLY'S  IIEVIEWER8. 

thousands  of  readers.  Such  is  one  of  "the  best 
judges."  Do  we  comjihiin  without  reason  of  such 
reviewing-  or  reviewers; 

Mr.  Morgan  ends  by  asserting  tliat  Mr.  Donnelly 
has  killed  the  Baconian  theory  and  buried  it  "  deeper 
than  ever  plummet  sounded."  Has  he,  indeed? 
That  is  just  exactly  what  we  are  going  to  see ! 
Meanwhile  Mr.  Morgan  personally  abjures  the 
Baconians,  of  whose  Spartan  band  he  was,  he  says,  a 
member.  Stand  fast,  brood  of  Leoni(Uis!  You  can 
spare  him!  Ten  years  ago  he  published  a  book,  The 
ShaJcesjjeare  Myth.  I  will  not  claim  that  it  was 
faultless,  but  it  was  a  strong,  and  in  the  main  admir- 
able, brief  in  the  case  against  Shakespeare ;  and  it 
stands  to-day  unanswered  and  unanswerable.  Be- 
fore he  takes  his  leave  of  the  Baconians,  I  recom- 
mend him  to  confute  his  own  volume.  To  do  that 
would  justify  his  apostac}^,  but  I  tell  him  plainly 
that  the  task  is  beyond  his  powers! 

VII. 

The  next  one  of  "  the  best  judges  "  who  deserves 
attention,  is  Mr.  H.  A,  Clapp,  who  appeared  by 
special  editorial  announcement,  in  tlie  Boston  Daily 
Advertiser  of  May  18,  of  which  eminent  paper  he 
is  understood  to  be  the  dramatic  critic.  He  is  also 
known  as  a  fine  lecturer  on  Shakespeare. 

It  is  simply  sorrowful  to  find  him  on  the  wool- 
sack with  Mr.  Appleton  Morgan,  in  such  a  trial. 
The  Advertiser  itself  is  a  comfort  among  journals, 
and  its  dramatic  notices  esjiecially  have  always 
seemed  to  me  unexcelled  for  judiciousness  and 
charm.  Alas !  to  find  their  graceful  author  alter- 
nately hooting  among  ''  the  best  judges"  and  hopping 


MB.  D ONNELL  Y\S  BE VIEWEBS.  53 

along  upon  bladders,  like  a  giddy   Bassaride,  in  a 
vindictive  chase  after  Mr.  Donnelly! 

He  lias  over  two  columns  of  unqualified  condem- 
nation, based  upon  the  initial  declaration  that  "  no 
competent  critic  will  have  the  patience"  to  go 
through  the  Great  Cryptogram  ;  so  that  the  world, 
he  avers,  will  never  know  whether  the  authors  solu- 
tions are  justified.  Unless  Mr.  Clapp  owns  that  he 
is  not  a  "  com])etent  critic,"  in  which  case  he  is  only 
an  ordinary  reviewer,  and  no  good  except  for  defa- 
mation, this  is  tantamount  to  saying  that  he  has 
never  read  the  book  he  is  going  to  criticise.  His 
course  is  sensible.  To  read  a  book,  before  deciding 
on  its  value,  interrupts  the  flowing  freedom  of  one's 
periods  in  condemning  it.  Mr.  Clapp's  article,  apart 
from  its  express  avowal,  shows  that  this  has  been 
his  method.  It  is  an  interesting  confession  to  start 
with. 

Honest  perusal  thus  given  the  go-by,  for  lack  of 
'•  patience,"  his  plan  is  to  prance  hoppety-skip  over 
a  small  part  of  the  volume,  flippantly  picking  out 
here  and  there  such  phrases  as  may  be  used  to  show 
that  Mr.  Donnelly  is  a  multitudinous  ignoramus, 
knowing  little  or  nothing  of  the  rules  of  nuithemat- 
ics  or  logic,  or  matters  relating  to  the  text  of  the 
plays,  and  generally  incompetent.  His  aim  is  to 
invalidate  the  book  by  a  series  of  minute  cavils  on 
side  issues.  Nothing  like  compreliensive  or  substan- 
tial treatment  is  even  attempted.  A  few  (pul)bles 
are  all  the  base  of  objection.  It  is  told  of  a  gay 
French  editor  that,  one  terribly  sultry  day,  lie 
plumped  down  at  his  desk,  seized  his  editorial  pen, 
and  shouted,  '•  1  am  going  to  give    it  to  the   sun 


54  MLi.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

good  !  "  The  Great  Cryptogram^  too,  lias  now  to 
catch  it,  and  it  appears  that  this  sun  is  to  bo  judged 
by  its  spots,  liut,  as  tliese  are  mainly  Mr.  Clap})'s 
irdv-spots,  and  not  an  essential  part  of  the  luminarv, 
1  submit  that  they  form  no  ])i"oper  basis  for  its 
denunciation. 

Here  are  the  assaults,  seriatim :  Mr.  Donnelly 
says  that  authors  have  a  parental  love  for  their 
works,  citing,  as  apropos,  lines  from  the  Shakespeare 
Sonnets,  such  as  those  which  call  a  writer's  thoughts 
"the  children  of  his  brain,"  or  declare  them  to  have 
a  worth  which  will  make  them  outlive  the  monu- 
ments of  princes,  etc.  "  Clear  blunderheadedness," 
Mr.  Clapp's  retorts,  "he  mistakes  the  author's  asser- 
tion of  the  enduring  worth  of  his  sonnets  for  an 
assertion  of  the  worth  of  his  plays."  Kot  at  all, 
and  Mr.  Clapp  here  combines  essential  misrepresen- 
tation with  flippant  insult.  Mr.  Donnelly,  manifestly, 
cites  the  sonnet  lines  to  illustrate  the  general  truth 
that  an  author's  thoughts  are  to  him  as  precious 
offspring ;  just  as  he  might  have  cited  lines  from 
Spenser  or  Shelley,  and  with  no  less  ai)i)ositeness. 
But  at  any  rate  it  is  fine  in  Mr.  Clapp  to  assume,  for 
a  basis,  that  an  author  does  not  necessarily  love  "  the 
children  of  his  brain."  He  ought  to  have  known 
that  "the  contrary  opinion  of  critics,"  and  "the 
almost  universally  accepted  belief,"  which  he  as 
gratuitously  as  insolently  reproaches  Mr.  Donnelly 
for  "  never  having  heard  of,"  are  mighty  poor  evi- 
dence that  Shakespeare,  whoever  he  was,  did  n(jt 
cherish  his  plays;  and  also  mighty  good  evidence 
that  the  fool-killer  is  as  sound  asleep  as  Frederick 
Barbarossa  in  his  cavern.     Meanwhile,  how  does  any 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  55 

awkwardness  \\\  illustration,  even  if  it  existed,  or 
any  possible  ig-norance  of  "the  opinion  of  critics," 
or  of  ''universally  accepted  (and  highly  asinine) 
beliefs,  affect  the  substantial  value  of  the  Great 
CrDptofjramf  Really  the  non-seq^uitur  here  is  so 
gross  as  to  suggest  the  noii  compos!  * 

The  reviewer's  labors  continue  with  the  assertion 
that  Mr.  Donnelly  beginning  his  toils  on  the  cijiher 
by  '*  picking  out  words  without  the  help  of  a  con- 
cordance," shows  what  sort  of  a  mind  he  has.  The 
information  in  regard  to  this  piece  of  oafishness,  or 
leaden  stupidity,  is  derived  from  the  book,  and  is 
flat  misrepresentation,  Mr.  Donnelly  simply  says 
that  when  he  bcii'an,  fifteen  years  ago.  to  look  over 
the  })lavs  for  surface  indications  of  a  cipher,  he  had 
no  concordance: — naturally  enough,  being  then  in  a 
lonely  mansion,  in  Minnesota,  on  the  banks  of  the 
Mississippi.  This  petty  perversion  shows  the  spirit 
in  which  his  critic  assails  him. 

Mr.Clapp  next  shows  that  Ford  inthe  J/e/vy  Wives 
buffets  himself  on  the  forehead,  crying  "peere-out," 
in  allusion  to  the  horns  of  his  cuckokby,  and  derides 
Mr.  Donnelly  mercilessly  for  having  failed  to  catch 
the  meaning  of  his  exclamation,  and  also  for  consid- 
ering it  a  "forced"  expedient  to  get  a  word  for  the 
second  syllable  of  Shakes))eai'e's  name.  Here  is 
another  mountain  made  out  of  a  mole  hill!  At 
most  the  error  pointed  out  is  a  mere  misreading — a 
solitary  mistake  too  small  for  more  than  good-natured 
correction  Avithout  comment.  But  in  regard  to  the 
phrase,  "  peere-out,"  Mr.  Donnelly  is  plainly  right, 
for  while  it  is  well  enough,  it  shows  more  ingenuity 
than  felicitv,  and  is  certainly  sufficiently   "  forced" 


56  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWKltS. 

into  the  text  to  attract  attention  by  its  peculiarity. 
Horns  do  not  naturally  "  peer,"  Mr.  Clapp,  though 
eyes  do ! 

Mr.  Donnelly  is  next  accused  of  ''ignorance"  or 
"foolishness"  for  noticing,  as  a  similar  ])eculiarity, 
the  evident  di'agging  in  of  a  name  in  the  Merry 
Wives.  The  host  bombastically  bawls  to  Dr.  Caius 
— "  Is  he  dead,  my  Ethiopian  ?  Is  he  dead,  my  Fran- 
cisco f  Ila,  bully!  What  says  my  Esculapius?" 
"  As  there  is  no  Francisco  in  the  play,"  observes  Mr. 
Donnelly,  "this  is  all  rambling  nonsense,  and  the 
word  seems  dragged  in  for  a  purpose."  "And  what 
pray,"  retorts  Mr.  Clapp,  "is  the  quality  of  the 
Host's  rhodomontade  ?  Is  not  Ethioj)ian  also  dragged 
in  ? "  Softly,  good  critic  !  As  the  jolly  host  is  spout- 
ing buffoonery,  he  may,  with  artistic  propriety,  call 
Dr.  Caius,  "  my  Ethiopian  ;"  he  may  also,  with  even 
better  cause,  call  him  "  my  Esculapius  ;"  and  he 
might  further  call  him  "  my  iguanodon,"  or  "my 
trilobite  ;  "  or  "  my  right-angled  triangle,"  or  "  my 
cassowary,"  or  "  my  jub-jub  bird  ;"  but  the  odd  rea- 
son there  is  in  nonsense  forbids  him  to  call  him  "  my 
Francisco,"  since  it  is  not  in  the  category  of  mere 
nonsense  words,  as  one  would  think  Mr.  Clapp 
might  see.  To  a  cipher  hunter  the  introduction  of 
a  proper  name  here  is  certainly  suspicious,  being 
incongruous  and  peculiar,  and  forming,  you  might 
say,  a  protuberance  on  the  level  surface  of  the  text. 

Mr.  Donnellv,  having  had  the  temerity  to  think  it 
sino^ular  that  Falstaff's  theivino^  crew  should  be  men- 
tioned  as  "  St.  Nicholas'  clerks,"  unless  the  word 
"  Nicholas  "  was  wanted  for  the  cipher,  (St.  Anthony 
being    the     true     scampsman's     patron),    is     next 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  57 

contemptuously  told  that, "  Reference  to  any  well  an- 
notated edition  would  have  tauo-ht  him  that  the 
phrases  '  St.  Nicholas'  clerks  '  and  '  St.  Nicholas' 
knights'  were  common  slang-  of  the  day  for  thieves 
and  robbers."  Reference  to  any  well  annotated 
edition  would  have  tauii:lit  him  nothino-  of  the  kind; 
see,  for  example,  Howard  Staunton,  a  prince  of 
Shakespeare  editors,  whose  note  on  the  subject  is  to 
the  effect  that  making  St.  Nicholas  the  tutelary 
guardian  of  cut-purses,  as  two  old  authors  he  cites 
have  improperly  done,  has  never  been  satisfactorily 
explained. 

The  next  charge  made  ao:ainst  the  book  is  too 
trivial  and  merely  nagging  to  deserve  notice.  Mr. 
Donnelly's  point  is  to  show  tlie  forced  use  of  lan- 
guage by  which  the  name  of  "  Bacon"  or  "  Bacon's 
son"  is  got  into  the  text.  The  sentence  is  Falstaff's 
chaff  of  the  men  he  is  robbing.  "  On,  Bacons,  on  ! 
What,  3'e  knaves  ? "  etc.  To  call  the  ti'avelers  "  Ba- 
cons" because  well-fed,  certainly  seems  a  forced  use 
of  language.  But  Mr.  Donnelly  is  picked  out  as  no 
sort  of  a  critic,  but  rather  an  inexpressible  simple- 
ton, for  remarking  that  it  docs  not  seem  a  term  of 
contumely,  such  as  Falstaff  would  naturally  use,  and 
hence  is  brought  in  somewhat  arbitrai-ily  for  the 
salce  of  getting  the  word.  After  all,  it  is  only  a  mat- 
ter of  opinion,  and  the  point  to  be  settMd  is  whether 
"  Bacons,"  used  as  an  epithet,  does  not  denote  a  con- 
straint of  hmguage,  which  it  surely  seems  to  do.  If 
it  does  not,  Mr.  Donnelly  is  not,  therefore,  proved 
a  fool,  as  his  critic  ought  to  know. 

"  These,"  says  Mr.  Clapp,  summing  up  at  this  point, 
"are   'specimen    bricks'    from   the   edifice   of    Mr. 


5S  }rR.  DONNELLY'S  REVTEWERS. 

Donnelly's  argument."  It  is  no  dearest  foe  of  the 
charming  critic  of  the  Advertiser — it  is  himself,  per- 
haps, in  this,  his  own  worst  enemy,  who  thus  pre- 
sents him  in  the  character  of  the  comic  numbskull 
of  Aristophanes,  who  comes  in  upon  the  stage,  amidst 
the  laughter  of  the  ages,  offering  a  brick  from  the 
core  as  a  specimen  of  the  marble  temple.  One  would 
think  so  bright  a  man  would  never  choose  to  follow 
in  the  footste[)S  of  such  an  illustrious  predecessor  as 
the  farcial  old  skolastikos.  Surely  a  few  of  the 
minor  components  of  a  book,  much  less  its  possible 
mistakes,  can  not  be  justly  held  to  represent  the  en- 
tire structure.  And  what  are  these  "specimen 
bricks"  from  the  Donnelly  edifice  ?  Six  little  errors, 
all  but  one  doubtful,  and  three  of  them  Mr.  Clapp's 
own!  All  else  of  varied  and  solid  excellence  abso- 
lutely ignored. 

As  if,  at  this  stage  of  the  indictment,  he  mis- 
gave himself  that  his  basis  for  condemnation  was  too 
meager,  he  proceeds  to  strengthen  it  by  another 
instance  of  the  author's  "  ignorance  and  folly," 
which  he  thinks  establishes  the  mental  kinship  of 
Mr.  Donnelly  to  Lord  Dundreary.  In  detailing 
how  he  worked  out  the  cipher,  Mr.  Donnelly  relates, 
with  a  good  deal  of  naivete,  how  he  discovered  (thus 
avoiding  being  led  into  a  plausible  error)  that 
because  the  tenth  word  of  a  column  from  the  top 
is  word  ten,  you  can  not,  therefore,  obtain  the  tenth 
word  from  the  bottom  of  a  column  by  simply  sub- 
tracting ten  from  the  whole  number.  He  speaks  of 
this  as  "  a  curious  fact,"  which  it  certainly  is  in  the 
sense  of  the  word  as  he  uses  it,  that  is,  odd,  though, 
of  course,  like  everybody  else,  he  knows  the  very 


MB.  D  ONNELL  Y'S  RE  VIE  WEES.  59 

simple  and  obvious  rationale  of  it.  But  Mr.  Clapp, 
intent  upon  letting  loose  the  theater  guffaw  upon 
him,  commences  operations  by  quoting  his  Avord 
"  curious ''  in  capitals, — a  paltry  little  trick,  which 
has  the  effect  of  giving  to  a  lightly  used  term  a 
solemnity  of  import  which  makes  its  author  seem 
ridiculous.  He  then  proceeds  to  establish  Mr.  Don- 
nelly's likeness  as  a  reasoner  to  the  stage  Dundreary, 
who  counts  five  fingers  on  his  right  hand,  counts 
backward  the  other  five  from  the  tenth  finger,  adds 
the  numeral  six  thus  obtained  to  the  five,  and  asks, 
"  where's  the  other  finger':!"  This  stroke  of  comic 
sophistry,  offered  as  ironical  argument,  may  make 
the  groundhngs  laugh,  but  must  make  the  judicious 
grieve.  Mr.  Clapp,  in  truth,  should  have  been 
ashamed  to  offer  it,  for  he  knows  perfectly  well  that 
it  establishes,  in  seriousness,  no  ])arallel  between  the 
bright  author  of  Atlantis  and  the  poor  softie  of  the 
upper  ten ;  and  that  the  one  taking  care  against  con- 
founding counting  with  subtraction  is  no  twin  to  the 
other,  puzzling  himself  with  a  figment  of  his  own 
inanity. 

The  smart  verbiage  against  the  validity  of  the 
cipher  which  follows  is  trifling  in  quantity  and 
quality,  and  may  be  passed  over  until  Mr.  Clapp 
has  swept  aside  Messrs.  Colbert  and  Bidder,  who 
are  decidedly  lions  in  his  way.  His  whole  article, 
of  over  two  columns,  is  composed  entirely  of  the 
petty  cavils  I  have  cited,  and  three  or  four  others  no 
more  important.  For  example,  that  Mr.  Donnelly 
can  not  have  found  a  Baconian  cipher,  because  Bacon 
says  tliat  a  cipher,  meaning  a  cipher  in  general, 
"should  be  easy  and  not  laborious  to  write,"  whereas 


GO  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

tlio  insertion  of  this  would  have  cost  the  assiduous 
labor  of  months.  As  if  a  cipher  story  containing 
the  marvelous  history  of  Bacon's  life  and  times,  of 
^Yhich  the  lirst  installments  onl}^  are  as  yet  given 
Avere  not  worth  the  assiduous  labor  of  montlis.  As, 
if  the  "  easy  "  ciphers  mentioned  in  the  Be  Angiiien- 
tis,  precluded  difficult  cipliers,  when  a  deeper  secrecy 
became  necessary!  As  if  Bacon  did  not  mention 
another  class  of  ciphers  so  laborious  that,  as  he  says, 
they  "  exclude  the  decipherer  !  "  For  example  again, 
that  there  could  not  be  a  cipher  for  Mr.  Donnelly  to 
find,  because  the  edition  is  full  of  gross  errors  of  all 
Idnds,  this  being  one  of  Mr.  Appleton  Morgan's 
quiddities.  As  if  the  terribly  corrupt  state  of 
Dante's  text  prevented  it  from  being  made  the 
receptacle  of  Dante's  ciphers,  some  of  which  the 
elder  Rossetti  has  exposed  !  As  if  Montaigne,  in 
Bacon's  own  time,  had  not  said,  with,  as  I  think,  a 
most  significant  oblique  look  at  some  of  the  plavs 
which  make  up  this  very  first  folio,  "  I  have  known 
authors  who,  by  a  knack  of  writing,  have  got  both 
title  and  fortune,  yet  disown  their  apprenticeship, 
furposeli)  corrupt  their  style,  and  affect  ignorance  of 
so  vulgar  a  quality." 

But  enough.  It  can  be  admitted  tliat  Mr.  Cla]ip 
has  made  in  his  article  a  poignant  omelette,  but  the 
eggs  are  from  a  mare's  nest.  His  phillijiic  is  a 
palpable  absurdity  compounded  of  little  absurdities. 
The  main  wonder  about  it  is  that  any  considerable 
number  of  people  should  have  swallowed  it,  for  it 
appears  that  it  has  been  greatly  admired,  and  that 
its  ''  specimen  bricks "  were  considered  to  have 
quite  demolished  the  Great  Cryj)togram.     In  Boston, 


MB.  DONNELLY'S  liEVIEM'ERS.  61 

and  the  nicaiiy  satellite  towns  which  surround  that 
urban  planet,  it  seems  to  have  divided  admiration 
with  a  two-and-a-half  column  article,  small  type,  in 
the  Daily  Globe  of  May  27,  full  of  "  specimen 
bricks  "  to  throw  at  Mr.  Donnelly,  and  much  heralded 
as  the  work  of  Mr.  George  II.  Richardson.  I  read 
this  production  attentively,  and  forbear  descant  on 
its  elaborate  impotence.  One  of  its  admirers  called 
it  "  the  death-knell  of  Donnellv's  volume,"   which 

-J  7 

made  me  think  of  the  sonorous  boll  invented  by  a 
man  in  Pennsvlvania,  composed  of  a  slieep's  trotter 
hung  in  an  old  felt  hat.  The  solemn  tolling  of  such 
an  instrument  would  be  akin  to  "  the  death-knell  of 
Donnelly's  volume"  sounded  by  this  ringing  review. 

VIII. 

•  Another  of  "  the  best  judges  "  is  the  reviewer  of 
the  New  York  Herald  (May  6,)  who  occupies  live 
mortal  columns,  small  type,  in  deploying  the  variety 
and  extent  of  his  misinformation  on  Bacon- 
Shakespeare  matters  in  general.  The  article  is  appar- 
ently not  written  by  one  of  the  Herald  staff, 
a  racy  tribe,  but  by  some  one  of  the  class  known 
ironically  as  "  literary  fellers."  Nothing  more  mis- 
leading has  prol)ably  been  published,  and  one  mar- 
vels that  the  magnificent  circulation  of  the  Herald 
should  liave  been  given  to  the  dissemination  of  such 
effreffious  flubdub.  The  radical  ignorance  which 
pervades  the  whole  composition  like  a  vicious  humor, 
and  breaks  out  everywhere  in  a  copious  rash  of 
sophisms,  falsehoods  and  perversions,  is  illustrated 
by  a  single  rejoinder,  which  aims  to  combine  serious 
fact  WMth  withering  witticism.  Mr.  Donnelly  h;id 
mentioned    the     circumstance    that    the    name    of 


62  MB.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

Shakespeare  in  the  sixteenth  century  was  considered 
the  quintessence  of  vulg-arity  —  what  was  called 
"  vile"  —  just  as  Snooks,  Itamsbottom  or  llogsilcsh 
would  be  with  us,  and  so  much  so  that  it  is  on  record 
that  a  man  of  that  name  got  it  changed  to 
'' Saunders,"  as  one  more  patrician.  To  which  the 
Herald  reYie^yev  retorts:  "What  arc  we  to  think  of 
the  name  of  Bacon,  which,  if  it  does  not  mean  llogs- 
flesh,  has  no  meaning  whatever?"  This  is  con- 
sidered a  cahn  and  crushing  repartee,  and  its  com- 
placent utterer  evidently  thinks  that  the  name  of 
Bacon  is  synonymous  with  smoked  jiork  !  The  name 
of  Bacon  derives  from  the  beech-tree,  "beechen," 
as  everybody  interested  in  such  matters  lias  long 
learned.  (Consult  the  old  antiquary,  Verstagan.)  But 
what  are  we  to  think,  at  the  outset,  of  the  qualifi- 
cation of  one  of  "  the  best  judges,"  who  knows  so 
little  of  the  man  he  is  waiting  about  that  he  docs 
not  even  know  anything  of  his  illustrious  name,  and 
fancies  it  idential  with  "  Hogsflesh  "  ? 

All  the  statements  he  presents  are,  without 
exception,  of  the  same  accurate  character.  One  of 
his  two  main  reasons,  for  believing  that  Bacon  could 
not  have  written  the  plays,  is,  that  to  write  them 
would  alone  have  taken  a  lifetime;  and  further  that 
it  was  not  physically  possil)le  for  any  one  man  to  have 
done  the  work  attributed  to  these  two.  The  lacts 
to  the  contrary  are,— first,  that  for  at  least  thirty 
years  Bacon  had  no  all-engrossing  employment; 
secondly,  that  so  far  from  occupying  the  allotted 
term  of  three-score  and  ten,  the  Shakespeare  plays 
were  produced  betw^een  about  1590  and  1612,  thus 
being   scattered  over  a  period  of  only  twenty-two 


MB.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  63 

years;  and  thirdly,  that  many  an  author  has  per- 
formed, single-handed,  the  work  of  both  Bacon  and 
IShakespeare ;  which,  by  a  count  liberal  to  extrava- 
gance, (each  play  and  each  treatise  being  considered 
a  book),  would  be  no  more  than  fifty  volumes,  and 
very  slender  ones  at  that.  The  count  of  the  plays  of 
^schylus  is  from  90  to  100  ;  of  Sophocles,  certainly 
115;  of  Calderon,  1S5  ;  of  Lope  de  Yega,  2,000 ;  of 
the  works  of  Voltaire,  Ti  volumes ;  of  Balzac,  about 
97 ;  of  George  Sand,  80  ;  and  so  on.  "  So  much  for 
Buckino-ham;"  but  the  rest  of  CoUev  Gibber's  line 
can  not  be  rung  in  here,  for  the  Herald  reveiwer 
must  have  alread}"  lost  his  head  when  he  entered 
upon  such  a  statement. 

His  second  main  reason,  for  believing  that  Bacon 
could  not  have  written  the  plavs,  is  found  in  the 
alleged  absolute  diiference  in  the  intellect  of  the 
two  men,  as  shown  by  their  respective  works.  I 
suppose  this  is  the  reason  why  the  unfortunate 
Shakespereans  are  kept,  as  the  sailors  sa}^  as  busy 
as  the  devil  in  a  gale  of  wind,  in  trying  to  refute 
the  myriad  of  identities  between  the  two  in  idea, 
thought,  expression,  vocabular}^,  point  of  view,  man- 
ner of  surveying  a  subject,  use  of  words  peculiar  to 
them,  particular  phrases,  and  even  errors,  which  the 
wicked  Baconians  are  forever  showering  upon  them ; 
and  which  are  apparently,  (in  many  cases,  indispu- 
tably), emanations  from  a  unique  mental  source. 
They  are  always  laboring  to  suppress  or  explain 
away  these  striking  ])arallelisms,  which  would  seem 
to  a  plain  mind  to  indicate  that  there  is  no  essential 
difference  in  tlie  intellect  of  the  two  men,  but  tliat 
thev  are  one  and  the  same ;  or  as  the  verv  knowing 


C4  MR.  B02iNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

Montaigne  signiricaritly  hints,  in  iliat  identical  period, 
"  a  case  of  one  man  wlio  presented  himself  for 
another."  But  no,  they  are  "accidental  resem- 
blances ; "  they  are  "  simple  plagiarisms ;  "  they  are 
"  such  parallels  as  you  can  lind  between  writers  in  any 
age;"  they  are  examples,  as  one  bright  bird  has 
recently  said,  of  how  you  can  always  lind  Bacon  in 
Shakespeare,  but  never  Shakespeare  in  Bacon !  These 
explanations  are  terribly  barred  by  the  fact  that  the 
parallelisms  are  not  occasional,  but  exist  by  hun- 
dreds. Mr.  Donnelly's  book  contains  a  formidable 
array  of  them,  nearly  all  striking,  intimate,  palpable 
in  identity.  Mrs.  Pott  shows  in  her  edition  of  the 
Provius,  a  multitude  of  Shakespeare  thoughts, 
hints,  expressions,  neologisms,  previously  existing  in 
Lord  Bacon's  private  note-book.  But  better  than 
even  these,  powerful  as  they  are,  are  the  series  of 
analogies,  too  subtle  and  interior,  and  too  massive 
and  comprehensive  to  be  accounted  for  as  acciden- 
tal, or  plagiarized,  or  imitated.  Man}^  of  them  are 
pointed  out  by  some  of  the  great  German  scholars, 
such  as  Gervinus,  or  Dr.  Kuno  Fischer  of  Heidel- 
berg. For  example,  that  the  natural  history  of  the 
human  passions,  which  Bacon  severely  criticises 
Aristotle  for  not  suppl^n'ng,  broadly  intimates  to  be 
extant  and  an  integral  and  necessar}'  part  of  his 
own  philosophy,  and  circumstantially  desci'ibes,  has 
been  exactly  produced  in  the  i)lays  of  Shakes])eare. 
For  another  example,  the  lack  of  intimate  intellect- 
ual S3"mpathy  with  the  Greek  mind,  and  the  con- 
spicuous affinity  with  the  lioman,  in  both  authors. 
Again,  the  theor3%  peculiar  to  both,  and  in  both  ex- 
actly the  same,  that  character  is  the  result  of  natural 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  05 

temperament  and  historical  position,  and  des- 
tin}"  the  result  of  character.  Further,  such  a  point 
as  the  perception  of  the  central  secret  of  Caesar's 
mental  constitution,  namel\',  his  blindness  thi'ough 
self-love  to  danger,  contem])t  for  which  threw  him 
at  length  under  the  knives  of  tlie  conspirators;  a 
perception  perfectly  unique  and  almost  miraculous 
in  its  penetrant  subtlety,  considering  tlie  com])lexity 
of  the  make-up  of  the  great  Roman,  and  wliich 
Bacon  and  Shakespeare  have  in  common.  And  for 
another  instance,  equally  striking  and  original,  take 
Bacon's  mention  of  Maik  Antony,  as  one  of  only 
two  signally  great  public  men  ^v\\o  ever  yielded  to 
the  "  mad  excess  of  love  ; ''  together  with  his  saying, 
in  the  same  essay,  that  love  is  ''sometimes  like,  a 
siren,  sometimes  like  a  fury  ;''  —  the  play  of  Aiitony 
and  Cleopatra  being  wi-itten  to  make  both  of  these 
propositions  dramatically  evident.  In  a  word,  so 
far  from  there  being  an  apparently  absolute  differ- 
ence in  the  two  intellects,  the  evidences  of  their 
similarity  are  so  conspicuous  and  numerous,  that  w^ere 
simple  ignorance  substituted  for  indurated  prepos- 
session,, everyone  would  readily  conclude  from  them 
that  Bacon  and  Shakespeare  were  only  different 
names  for  the  same  man. 

Some  glittering  generalities  the  Herald  reviewer 
sprays  the  public  with  in  this  connection,  which  make 
one  suspect  that  after  all,  though  he  makes  the  antith- 
esisoneof  substantial  intellect,  lie  means  that  Bacon 
and  Shakespeare  are  radically  different  in  style  or 
manner.  Not  as  much  as  he  fancies,  as  witness  the 
Rev.  Mr.  Bennrouffh's  admirable  versifications  of  some 


GG  MR.  DONNELL  Y  'S  ItE  VIE  WE  US. 

oi"  Bacon's  paragraphs,  given  in  last   year's   August 
nunilxn'  of  the  Bacon.  Jounud.     Here  is  a  sample: 

"Who  taught  tho  raven  in  a  drought  to  throw  pebblci 
into  a  hollow  tree  where  she  spied  water,  that  the  water  might 
rise  so  ihat  she  might  come  to  it?  Who  taught  the  bee  to  sail 
througli  such  a  vast  sea  of  air,  and  to  find  tlie  way  from  a  field 
in  fiower,  a  great  "way  off,  to  her  hive?  Who  taught  the  ant  to 
bite  every  grain  of  corn  she  buries  in  her  hill,  lest  it  should 
take  root  and  grow?" — Advancement  of  Learning. 
Here  is  Mr.  Eengouglrs  rendering  : 

"Who  taught  the  thirsty  raven  in  a  drought, 
Espying  water  in  a  liollow  tree, 
To  throw  in  pebbles  till  it  reached  her  beak? 
Who  taught  the  bee  to  sail  through  seas  of  air. 
And  find  her  far-oS  hive  from  fields  in  flower? 
Who  tgjjght  the  ant  to  bite  each  grain  of  corn 
She  burips  in  her  liill,  lest  it  take  root?" 
No  one,  not  destitute  of  sense,  can  fail  to  see  that 
onl}^  Mr.  Bengough's  versification  was  necessary  to 
bring  out  the  Shakesperean  quality  of  Bacon's  lines. 
Nevertheless,  I  will  never  admit  the  fairness  and 
justice,  not  to  say  common  sense,  of  exacting  an  ex- 
ternal resemblance  between  the  prose  of  Bacon  and 
the   verse   of    Shakespeare,  until    the   accomplished 
Herald  reviewer  will  show  the  likeness  between  even 
a  man's  own  work  in  the  two  forms  : — between  Cole- 
ridge in  his  prose  Aids  to  Reflection  and  Coleridge 
in  his  poem  Kubla  Khan  ;  or  Milton  in  his  enchant- 
ing; Oomus,  and  Milton  in  his  blaring  Tetrachordon. 
Who  that  ever  read  the  wonderful  letters  of  Lord 
Byron,  with  their  vast  gayety  and  reality,  their  good 
salt  savor  of  the  world  and  life,  their  infinite  and 
brilliant  diversit\^  would  possibly  imagine,  if  Childe 
Harold  had   been  published  anonymously,  that  all 
that  somber  and  oceanic  grandeur  had  swept  from 


MR.  DONNELLY  S  REVIEWERS.  G7 

the  same  mind?  To  exact  that  Bacon's  prose  shall 
show  an  exterior  likeness  to  the  Shakespeare  poetry 
is  supremely  ridiculous,  though  the  two  will  stand 
the  comparison  far  better  than  most,  as  many  a  good 
scholar  knows.  But  words  are  vain  to  express  the 
utter  shallowness  and  stupidity  of  insisting  on  the 
parallel.  The  Shakespereolaters,  however,  are  doing 
it  constantly.  Why  don't  they  pull  out  the  roots  of 
their  hair  with  tweezers  if  they  want  to  appear  intel- 
lectual, and  not  resort  to  such  futile  devices  as  these? 

The  Herald  reviewer's  pudding  is  full  of  plums 
in  the  part  where  he  contrasts  Bacon  with  Shakes- 
peare. One  is  that  Bacon  "  pays  no  homage  to  the 
imagination,"  a  Delphic  line  which  means,  I  sup- 
pose, that  in  him  the  faculty  is  subordinate  or  non- 
existent. On  the  contrary.  Bacon's  imagination  is 
tremendous.  The  Novuin  Organum  is  the  proof  of 
it  —  a  creation  like  a  world.  "He  has  thought," 
says  Taine,  "  in  the  manner  of  artists  and  poets,  and 
he  speaks  after  the  manner  of  prophets  and  seers." 
In  his  mind  the  imagination  is  the  all ;  the  other 
faculties  are  the  spicula,  the  accessoi'ies  of  it,  and 
surcharged  with  its  mighty  magnetic  life. 

Another  plum  is  that  Shakespeare's  genius  is 
"  essentially  dramatic,  with  all  the  faults  and  limita- 
tions of  the  stage."  How  perfectly,  how  eloquently, 
Charles  Lamb  has  smashed  this  preposterous  affirma- 
tion, in  the  essay  where  he  shows  how  impossible  of 
representation,  how  infinitely  beyond  all  stage  capac- 
ity and  conditions,  how  absolutely  addressed  to  the 
rapt  imagination  of  the  private  reader,  are  the  great 
|)lavs !  No  wonder  that  Hen-  Benedix  can  dem- 
onstrate    that  they  violate  or    transcend   all   stage 


US  AIR  BOXyEL L  Y  'S  BE  VIE  WERS. 

requirements ;  no  wonder  that  the  stage  managers 
never  let  the  curtain  rise  on  some  of  them,  and  cut, 
slash,  and  more  or  less  transmogrify  the  others.  Foi" 
the}^  are  not  *'  essentially  dramatic,"  they  are  too 
vastl}'  ideal ;  too  subtle  and  colossal  for  the  theater  ; 
and,  however  much  the  author  may  be  a  dramatist, 
he  is  infinitely  more  a  dramatist  to  the  mind.  It  is 
not  as  a  skilled  playwright,  but  as  a  mighty  poet, 
that  he  has  his  hold  upon  us. 

Anumgthe  other  plums  is  the  reviewer's  assertion 
that  "  there  is  nothing  in  Bacon  that  might  not  have 
been  written  by  dozens  of  philosophers  since 
Aristotle."  One  would  like  to  see  those  philos- 
ophers :  Would  the  reviewer  kindly  send  us  up  a  dozen 
on  the  half  shell?  To  think  of  the  dazzling,  stupendous 
paneg3'ric  piled  to  the  one  only  memory  of  Bacon  by 
the  wise  and  great  of  every  succeeding  age  and  every 
land,  and  then  to  think  of  such  an  estimate  nnd 
such  reviewing!  But  it  is  quite  equaled  by  the 
assertion  following,  that  "there  are  hundreds  of 
passages  in  Shakespeare  that  no  man  or  demigod  be- 
fore him  could  have  conceived."  This  is  pure  rliodo- 
montade.  Shakespeare  is  simply  one  of  a  limited 
number  of  supreme  poets,  just  as  great  as  he,  among 
whom  are  Homer,  iEschjdus,  Lucretius,  Juvenal, 
the  unknown  author  of  Job,  Isaiah,  Ezekiel  and 
Dante ;  and  there  are  no  passages  of  his  superior  in 
poetic  power  and  beauty  to  theirs.  It  is  conceded 
bv  all  hio'h  criticism. 

The  reviewer  has  one  saving  grace:  he  does  not 
expressly  deny  the  existence  of  the  cipher  story  in 
the  plays,  as  some  of  his  impudent  confreres  have 
done,  though  he  does  not  admit  it,  and  aims  to  liout 


MR.  DONyiJLLY'S  nETTEWERS.  C9 

and  belittle  it,  sneering  at  it  as  "wretched  flimsy 
tuttle.-'  So  far  as  decipliered,  it  is,  as  before  said, 
a  series  of  recitals,  which  begin,  so  to  speak,  in  the 
middle  of  events,  and  tell  of  Shakespeare's  lawless 
and  dissolute  youth  ;  of  his  raid  upon  Sir  Thomas 
Lucy's  estate;  of  the  subsequent  battle  between  his 
party  and  the  gamekeepers,  in  which  he  is  wounded  ; 
of  his  flight  to  London  and  employment  at  the 
theater ;  of  his  making  a  great  hit,  in  due  time,  by 
pla^^ing  FaistatT,  which  Bacon  conceived  on  the  sug- 
gestion of  his  personal  appearance;  of  his  enforced 
marriage;  to  Ann  Hathaway,  who  was  with  child  by 
him;  of  his  gross  life  and  maladies;  of  Cecil  seeing 
sedition  in  the  play  of  Richard  11.^  and  writing  to 
the  Queen,  denouncing  both  Marlowe  and  Shakes- 
eare  as  merely  covers  for  Bacon  ;  of  the  prosecu- 
tion of  Dr.  Ileyward  as  an  accomplice  and  the  per- 
sonal assault  upon  him  b}^  the  Queen  with  her 
crutch ;  of  the  occupation  of  the  theater  by  troops, 
the  flight  of  tlie  actors,  the  danger  and  despair  of 
Bacon,  the  orders  for  tlie  arrest  and  torture  of 
Shakespeare,  his  escape  to  France,  etc.  Now  why 
this  extremely  novel,  interesting  and  picturesque 
narrative  should  be  descril)ed  as  "  wretched,  flims}'' 
tattle,"'  no  one  can  sav,  but  I  will  engage  that  if  it 
told  in  favor  of  Shakespeare,  instead  of  against  him, 
we  should  never  hear  a  word  to  its  discredit.  And 
as  tlie  reviewer  tacitly  acce])ts,  in  Mr.  Donnelly's 
own  words,  what  the  remainder  is  to  contain — a 
recital  of  "the  inner  life  of  kings  and  queens,  the 
highest,  perhaps  the  basest  of  their  kind;"  of  the 
first  colonization  of  the  American  continent,  in 
which  Bacon  and  Raleigh  were  prominent;  of  "the 


10  MR  DONXKI. L  Y  'S  REYIK  WERS. 

Spanish  Armada;"  of  tlie  war  of  the  Huguenots 
under  Henry  of  Navarre  aguinst  the  League,  in 
wliich  several  of  the  Elizabethan  men  took  part;  of 
Bacon's  downfall  under  King  James,  and  the  rest; 
it  is  still  more  diftieult  to  see  how  such  a  tale  can  be 
included  under  epithets  of  dishonor  like  "wretched^ 
llimsy  tattle." 

The  character  given  (.'ecil,  Bacon's  deadly  and 
malicious  enemy,  is  discredited  by  the  reviewer  as 
new  to  history.  It  is,  he  says,  "as  fanciful  as  lago." 
It  is  nothing  of  the  kind.  When  Cecil  died,  Bacon, 
without  naming  him,  drew  the  same  character  in 
his  essay  On  Deformity^  and  the  London  reading- 
public,  recognizing  the  portrait,  laughed  in  scorn  at 
its  felicity.  The  reviewer  represents  further,  as 
against  the  reality  of  the  cipher,  that,  supposing 
Bacon  to  have  been  convicted  of  sedition  and  treason, 
the  motive  to  destroy  him  "  in  that  liberal  and  whole- 
some period,"  and  the  powder  to  do  so,  were  alike 
wanting.  Then  how  did  Southwell  and  Campian 
come  to  the  rack,  and  Norfolk  and  Essex  to  the 
block,  and  a  multitude  of  others  of  note  suffer  bloody 
and  violent  deaths  under  Elizabeth  ?  "  That  liberal 
and  wholesome  period !  "     God  save  us ! 

The  reviewer  admits  wnth  a  curiously  meek  and 
helpless  irrelevance  all  the  sordid,  vulgar,  profane 
details  of  Shakespeare's  personal  life  and  surround- 
ings at  Stratford,  as  indeed  he  must,  for  they  have 
been  mainly  accumulated  by  the  greatest  Shakes- 
peare scholars,  men  like  Halliwell-Pliillips,  How- 
ard Staunton,  and  others ;  and  the  Baconians  have 
had  nothing  to  do  with  gathering  them.  They  are 
entirely  unrelieved,  as  those  of    his  later  life  also 


MB.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  71 

are,  by  detail  of  a  higher  and  purer  moral  quality; 
and  it  is  a  nice  reviewer  that,  liaving  to  admit  them, 
thinks  he  can  make  them  compatible  with  Shakes- 
peare's reputed  genius  and  the  vast  exaltation  of 
the  plays.  The  anomaly  they  constitute  is  solitary 
in  the  history  of  literature,  and  has  made  every 
thinker  recoil. 

A  fumbling  and  nerveless  effort  is  next  made  to 
maintain  that  learning  was  as  accessible  to  Shakes- 
peare as  to  Chatterton  and  Burns,  and  that  he  had 
acquired  it.     Everyone  who  knows  anything  of  the 
conditions  of  that  time,  knows  that  the  difficulties  of 
such  an  acquisition  were  far  greater  then  than  now  ; 
but  no  man  in  any  time,  especially  Elizabeth's,  could 
get  learning  without  leaving  a  trail.     Shakespeare 
has   left   none.     From  the  filthy,  savage,  bookless 
hole  of  a  town  where  he  had  passed  a  rough,   wild 
youth,  lie  comes  to  London,  and  before  long  produces 
an  extended  poem  in  the  most  elegant  EngHsh  of  his 
time,  Avithout  a  trace  of  the  uncouth  AVarwickshire 
dialect,  full  of  classic  reminiscence  and  allusion,  and 
redolent  of  classic  grace  and  charm.     How  could  he 
have  done  it?     It   is  impossible.     He  was  not  the 
man.     And  what  liavo  Burns  and  Chatterton  to  do 
with   the   case?     AVe  know   just   what   thev    were 
tauo-ht,  and  how,  and  where.     Thev  were  not  learned 
at  all ;  they  were  only  fairly  educated, and  their  attain- 
ments were  no  more  than  commensurate  with  their 
literary  achievement.     Burns  was  simply  a  fine  lyric 
poet,  exquisite  in  his  Ayrshire  dialect,  commonplace 
in  English  ;    his  whole  merit,  apart  from  his  sturdy 
manliness,  lying  in  his  command  of  a  wild  skylark- 
music — a  power   of   verbal  lilt  hardly  comparable. 


72  MR.  D ONNEL  L  Y  '5  RE  VIE  WER8. 

Cliatlerton  was  [in  unearthly  boy,  "witli  a  marvelous 
faculty  for  catching  the  s})irit  and  tone  of  antique 
})ocms,  which  he  imitated  in  forgeries,  not  (|uite 
skillful  enough  to  escape  detection.  What  parallel  is 
there  between  them  and  the  continental  Shakes- 
])eare  'i  What  analogy  between  their  known  acquire- 
ment, such  as  it  is,  and  the  unaccountable  learning 
of  the  ])lays,  which  is  prodigious  in  every  direction  ; 
which,  as  Miss  Bacon  nobly  says,  lies  thickly  strewn 
on  tlie  surface  of  all  the  earlier  plays,  and  in  the 
later  has  disolved  and  gone  into  the  clear  intelli- 
gence? Take  but  a  single  province:  law.  Better 
than  Lord  Campbell,  Mr.  Rushton  of  Liverpool,  has, 
if  the  lapse  of  years  lets  me  remember  rightly, 
shown  Shakespeare's  involved  mastery  of  all  the 
depths  and  breadths  of  English  jurisprudence  ;  and 
others,  like  Armitage  Brown,  that  he  even  knew  the 
local  law  of  French  and  Italian  towns.  A  marvel  of 
it,  too,  is  that  it  is  alwaj^s  accurate.  He  is  the  only 
signal  instance  of  a  literaiy  man  who  has  touched 
law  without  blunders.  Godwin  was  a  powerful  and 
highly  trained  mind,  but  his  novel,  Caleh  Williams, 
is  a  legal  impossibility,  with  its  hero  tried  again  for 
a  murder  of  Avhich  he  had  been  once  acquitted! 
Thackeray,  so  worldly  wise  and  know^ing,  makes 
property  fail  of  the  heir,  because  the  donor  in  dying 
leaves  only  his  clearly  attested  oral  desire  as  to  its 
disposition; — a  ruling  at  which  all  the  wise  old  owls 
of  the  Bench  Avould  hoot  in  chorus.  So  Avitli  all 
English  w^riters,  however  bright,  who  have  dabbled 
in  law.  Shakespeare  alone  is  unimpeachable. 
Where  did  he  get  this  mighty  erudition?  Genius, 
however  great,  could  not  give  it  to  him.     It  comes 


MB.  D  OXNELL  Y '  S  BE  VIE  WEBS.  73 

alone  by  hard  and  special  study.  Where  and  how 
could  he  make  that  study  without  leaving  a  record  ? 
And  where  did  he  get  the  learning  to  enable  him  to 
acquii-e  the  learning  ?  For  in  that  time  the  law  was 
all  in  Norman- French,  law  Latin  or  barbarous  Latin- 
ized English,  The  law  of  the  immediate  past,  as  in 
the  great  treatises,  such  as  Glanville  and  Bracton, 
was  wliolly  in  law  Latin.  The  3'ear  books,  or  re- 
ports of  cases,  from  Edward  I.  to  Henry  YIIL,  a 
period  of  over  200  years,  and  following  them  the 
reports  or  commentaries  of  Coke,  Plowden,  Dj^er, 
reaching  to  the  times  of  Elizabeth  and  James,  were 
in  ]N'orman -French.  The  elaborate  and  intimate 
satire  in  Ilamlei,  of  tlie  proceedings  in  the  case  of 
Hales  V.  Petit,  involved  a  knowledge  of  the  report  in 
Plowden,  where  it  appears  in  that  language.  "What- 
ever else  there  was  of  laAV,  outside  of  the  French  and 
Latin,  was  in  an  English  so  crabbed  with  Latinized 
terms  that  none  but  lawyers  could  understand  it. 
What  trace  has  the  man  Shakespeare  left,  what 
trace  could  he  fail  to  leave,  of  his  strug-gle  to 
acquire  these  tongues?  And  yet  we  are  told  of  his 
similitude  to  Chatterton  and  Burns!  Go  in  peace. 
Herald  reviewer !  The  man  tliat  knew  that  world 
of  law,  that  knew  all  those  otlier  worlds  of  learning, 
was  not  a  Chatterton,  nor  a  Burns;  nor  was  he  by 
any  discoverable  sign  or  token,  the  man  of  Stratford 
either. 

It  is  not  ingenuous  in  the  reviewer  to  sneering! v 
term,  at  a  later  stage  of  his  article,  the  details  of 
Shakespeare's  early  life  in  London,  Mr,  Donnelly's 
"discoveries,"  They  are  not  his  discoveries  at  all, 
save  in  circumstantiality;  but  substantially  the  vulgar 


74  MM.  DONNELL  T  'S  RE  VIEWERS. 

facts  collected  by  all  the  Shakespeare  scholars 
from  Theobald,  Malone  and  Stevens  downward  ;  and 
;ill  that  Ml-.  Donnelly  makes  of  them  is  to-  put  them 
forward  as  palpably  incongruous  with  the  claims 
made  for  Shakespeare's  august  genius;  though  his 
critic  states,  without  the  least  warrant,  that  they  are 
broLiglit  up  as  so  many  slop  pails  to  empty  ovei-  the 
poor  young  scamj)  of  Stratford,  lie  thinks  Shakes- 
peare could  not  have  been  the  baddish  youth  Mr. 
Donnelly,  together  with  the  students  and  the  facts, 
linds  him,  because  when  lie  arrived  in  London,  a 
famished  runawa}^  he  did  not  at  once  become  afoot- 
pad  and  take  the  crooked  path  to  the  gallows.  He 
holds  him  singularly  courageous  and  noble  because 
he  married  the  woman  he  had  wronged,  and 
held  horses  at  the  theater  for  a  living,  instead  of 
deserting  her  and  making  straight  for  Tyburn. 
Although  the  marriage  seems  to  have  been  compul- 
sory, and  the  horse-holding  as  lucrative  as  necessary, 
his  course,  as  nobody  denies,  w^as  commendable 
enough,  though  not  deserving  of  the  preposterously 
fervent  eulogies  of  the  reviewer,  who  even  calls  his 
very  ordinary  good  conduct,  '•' Shakesperean."  Far 
less  commendatory,  thouoh  stoutlv  defended  as  bv  a 
true  devil's  attorney,  is  his  outrageous  usury :  so 
outrageous  that  it  seems  to  have  become  a  public 
scandal  at  the  time,  and  subjected  him  to  the  flings 
of  his  acquaintance,  and  the  biting  mockery  of  the 
Ratsei  pamphleteer.  To  this  it  appears  must  also 
be  added  skinflint  avarice  and  miserly  parsimony. 
All  of  it  the  reviewer  excuses  and  defends,  even  ex- 
tols, as  "  eminently  Shakesperean,''  on  the  ground 
that  Shakespeare  had  to   make  money ;  that  it  was 


MR.  DONNELLY- S  REVIEWERS.  75 

his  own  no  matter  how  gotten,  and  that  he  had  a 
right  to  be  as  usurious  as  he  pleased.  To  complete 
the  defense  other  literary  men  are  spattered — Vol- 
taire for  his  perfectly  legitimate  speculations ;  Words- 
worth for  nobly  requiring  his  guests  to  pay  for  other 
food  than  he  had  means  to  give  them  ;  Byron  for 
wanting  money  that  he  had  grandly  earned,  etc. 
Therefore  are  they  put  into  the  category  of  the 
Sti'atford  Shylock.  In  addition,  the  reviewer,  of 
course,  must  include  in  this  rogues'  gallery,  Bacon, 
for  ''  taking  bribes,"  a  charge  which  is  the  stock  in 
trade  of  Shakesperean  sciolists,  and  simply  an  ignor- 
ant lie.  It  is  fairly  in  consonance  with  these  gallant 
pleas  that  Shakespeare,  when  living  at  the  great 
]Srew  Place,  and  nuzzling  in  wealth,  should  be  de- 
fended for  increasing  his  slender  income  by  using 
the  line  mansion,  which  afterward  lodged  a  princess, 
for  the  brewing  of  malt  and  its  sale  to  lowlv  custom- 
ers.  The  defense  is  made  to  include  his  furnishinir 
a  clergyman,  his  guest,  with  sack  and  claret  and 
making  the  town  pay  for  them.  Of  course,  Mr. 
Donnelly  only  cites  these  actions,  not  to  object  to 
them  as  such,  but  to  put  their  petty  sordor  and  mean- 
ness in  proper  contrast  with  the  lustrous  character 
accorded  to  the  great  poet.  The  incongruity  would 
seem  apparent.  Imagine  the  magnificent  Kaleigh 
personally  brewing  and  selling  malt  in  Durham 
House.  Fancy  the  majestic  Verulam  tiying  his 
hand  at  it  in  the  kitchens  of  Gorhamburv.  And 
Shakespeare  before  the  ages  has  a  port  no  less  ideal 
and  lofty  than  these.  But  no,  says  the  Herald  re- 
viewer, there  is  no  incompatibility  ;  the  only  ques- 
tion is:     "Was    Shakespeare's    beer   well  brewed; 


76  MR.  IJON^'ELLY-S  REVIEWERS. 

was  the  malt  honest,  and  did  he  give  good  measure?" 
And  he  charges  that  Shakespeare, — engaged  in  the 
picayune  business  of  brewing,  like  Burns'  Willie,  "a 
peck  of  malt"  in  his  own  fine  house,  and  peddling  it 
out  to  his  po(jr  neighbors, — is  actually  "  accused  (by 
Mr.  DoimcUy)  of  engaging  in  an  honest  employment 
and  selling  theresults  of  his  industry  for  gain!"  Then, 
to  clinch  the  assertion  tliat  picking  up  pennies,  by 
making  and  selling  malt  in  the  grand  family  house, 
is  an  action  on  the  part  of  the  opulent  Shakespeare 
not  at  all  mean  in  itself,  nor  out  of  keeping  with  the 
grandeur  of  his  genius,  wo  are  reminded  that  the 
"shining  Prince  Bismarck"  derives  an  income  from 
the  making  of  whisky.  If  this  be  true,  it  is  no  more 
than  might  be  expected  from  the  gcU-\oYmg  old 
well r- wolf,  who  has  turned  sad  Europe  into  a  camp, 
and  would  fain  make  his  bloody  ravin  on  Tlepublics ; 
but  it  forms  no  sort  of  excuse  for  the  shabby  dis- 
grace of  the  man  Shakespeare. 

The  attempt  to  impugn  Mr.  Donnelly  for  criticis- 
ing Shakespeare's  dishonest  attempt  to  edge  into  the 
aristocracy  by  fraudulently  obtaining  a  coat  of  arms 
from  the  Herald's  College,  is  nothing  but  a  bit  of 
awkward  shuffling  with  words.  Shakespeare  is  not 
accused  of  seeking  social  elevation ;  he  is  accused, 
and,  what  is  more,  convicted,  of  trying,  with  the  aid 
of  John  Dethick,  a  rascally  Garter  King  at  Arms,  to 
gat  armorial  bearings  by  fraud  and  falsehood.  The 
evidence  in  the  matter  is  fully  given,  Avith  fatal 
candor,  l)y  Ilalliwell-Phillips,  the  highest  modern 
Shakespeare  authority,  and  also  in  full  detail  by 
Howard  Staunton,  an  equally  unimpeachable  scholar. 

The  five  columns  of  calumniation  which  compose 
the  revieAv  end  with  something  truly  beautiful.    The 


.¥A'.  DOyyELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  17 

writer  is  descantinoj  on  the  ravsterv  which  surrounds 
the  personality  of  Sliakespeare.  We  know  all  about 
the  other  great  men  of  the  time.  Essex,  Bacon, 
Raleigh,  Casaubon,  Sidney,  are,  he  says,  perfect  in- 
divi(hialities  to  us.  But  when  we  look  at  Shakes- 
peare, the  figure  is  dim.  We  see,  what ''.  "Only  the 
light  I"  This  is  certainly  lovely*.  I  remember  that 
at  the  time  of  Thackera3"'s  death,  some  ciiarming 
verses,  with  the  same  idea,  I  think  by  Mr.  Stoddard, 
appeared  in  one  of  the  journals.  The  poet  beholds 
the  laureled  ones  in  their  Yalhalla :  there  is  Homer, 
there  is  Dante,  there  are  thev  all.  one  bv  one,  and 

there 

"There  — little  seeu  but  light— 

The  only  Shakespeare  is." 

It  is  a  graceful  fancy,  but  as  a  means  of  account- 
ing for  the  absence  of  information  about  a  man  it 
is  certainlv  novel.  To  the  ordinarv  mind,  the 
''light''  about  the  personal  Shakespeare  is  very  much 
like  the  light  seen  about  a  bad  lobster  in  a  dark 
cellar,  and,  to  one  conversant  nith  the  details  of  his 
unsavory  biography,  there  is  a  smell  also.  The  talk 
about  his'  obscurity  is  utter  fustian.  In  th.e  iirst 
place,  such  a  man  as  he  couldnot  be  obscure.  Living 
in  the  midst  of  a  crowded  center  like  London,  and 
his  reputed  phiys  enjoying  a  great  popularity,  he 
would  become  at  once  the  object  of  intense  curiosit}^ 
and  everything  would  Ije  known  about  him  that  there 
was  to  know.  Any  pei'son  of  gumption  must  feel 
that  if  we  have  not  learned  something  different  in 
kind  about  him,  it  is  because  there  is  no  more  to 
leai-n.  But  secondly,  it  is  not  true  that  we  are  with- 
out his  memoirs;  we  have  an  ample   biography  of 


75  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

him,  Jind,  if  it  is  perplexing,  it  is  only  because  it  is 
misread,  or  its  significance  evaded.  The  labors  of 
the  Shakespeare  society,  and  of  numerous  scholars 
and  antiquaries,  in  several  countries,  have  resulted  in 
a  considei'ablc  mound  of  details  ;  and  if  much  of  this 
is  only  traditional,  it  must  be  borne  in  mind  that 
genuine  tradition,  as,  if  I  remember  rightly,  Sir 
(Teoj"ge  Corncwall  Lewis  has  superbly  proved, 
possesses  all  the  force  of  history.  The  only  trouble 
with  tiie  Shakespeare  biography  is  that  it  is  all  one 
way  in  land  ;  and  whenever  any  new  particulars  are 
brought  to  light,  they  are  invariably  of  the  same 
sort,  and  leave  the  biography  still  all  one  way.  In 
a  word,  the  zealous  labors  of  his  friends,  for  two  cen- 
turies, have  only  shown  that  personally  he  was  a 
perfect  vulgarian.  There  is  no  getting  away  from 
the  fact,  and  it  is  as  idle  to  say  that  we  have  not 
the  fullest  evidence  of  it,  as  it  is  that  we  are  so 
deficient  in  our  knowledge  of  him  as  to  see  nothing 
but  the  light  of  his  reputed  works,  when  we  look  irt 
his  direction.  And  to  refer  the  absence  of  creditable 
information  respecting  him  to  his  personal  modest}", 
and  a  desire  to  keep  in  the  background,  is  particu- 
larly fine  in  the  Herald  reviewer,  fresh  from  allow- 
ing  and  justifying  his  attempt  to  render  himself  ex- 
ceedingly conspicuous  by  getting  a  grant  of  nobility 
from  the  armorial  college !  It  is  also  particularly 
fine  in  the  reviewer  to  assert  that  the  tone  in  which 
"  he  was  addressed  by  those  who  knew  him  was  in- 
varial)ly  that  of  awe."  Bacon,  indeed,  as  his  sour 
contemporary  Osborne  relates  of  him,  "  struck  all 
men  with  an  awful  reverence ; "  and  Ben  Jonson 
shows  him  to  us  at  his  birthday  festival,  "standing 


ME.  DOKNF.LLY'S  REVIEWERS.  79 

amidst  the  smile  of  the  fires,  the  wine,  the  men,  as 
if  he  did  a  mystery."  But  how  many  are  they,  who 
knew  the  man  Skakespeare,  to  speak  of  him  otliei- 
than  with  disrespect  and  contempt  ?  "  Sta gepki3'er  I 
Mmnmer  !  "  —  Ilis  kinsman,  Rye  Qiumey,  hisses  at 
him  when  denied,  I  beheve,  a  loan.  ''  An  upstart 
crow  ...  in  his  own  conceit  the  only  Sliake-scene 
in  the  country,"  snarls  Greene.  "  One  who  feeds  on 
men,''  the  bitter  ghost  of  Ratsei  brands  him.  Mani- 
festh""  feigning  in  his  verse,  in  his  prose  Ben  Jonson 
speaks  of  him  only  as  an  actor,  (strange  that  this 
manifest  fact  has  not  been  noticed,)  patronizes  him, 
with  marked  superciliousness,  flouts  at  him,  mocks 
at  his  blundering  tongue,  says  iiistalk  had  often  to  be 
"  snuffed  out,"  excuses  his  shortcomings  with  good- 
natured  half-contempt,  vents  on  him  praise  in 
pompous  iron3\  Where  is  the  "  awe  ? '"  Sometimes, 
it  is  true,  he  is  mentioned  pleasanth'.  Henry  Chettle, 
writing  very  diplomaticallv  and  guardedly,  as  one 
who  knew  of  him  only  or  mainly  by  report,  speaks  of 
him  as  an  excellent  actor,  as  known  for  '"his 
facetious  grace  in  writing,"  and  in  good  repute  for 
fair  dealing.  But  who  is  he  that  ever  mentioned 
him  in  a  tone  of  '•  awe  ? " 

Such  is  the  reviewer,  w^ho  has  the  advantage  of 
five  columns  in  a  widely  spread  journal,  to  injure 
Mr.  Donnelly's  book  by  specious  defamation.  The 
fact  that  the  greater  number  of  peo]ile  are  not,  and 
can  not  be  expected  to  be  conversant  with  the  facts 
of  the  matter,  and  can  therefore  be  misled  by  the 
falsest  representations,  is  the  only  consideration 
■which  renders  tlie  article  of  the  slightest  importance. 
That  a  work  of  sterling  excellence  and  value  should 


80  MR.  DONNELJ.  Y'S  HE  I  IK  WERS. 

be  subject  to  the  assault,  and  receive  the  injury  of 
such  a  Jack  o'  lantern  brigade  of  lies,  is  sufficient 
comment  on  the  precious  system  of  reviewing. 

IX. 
Another  of  "  the  best  judges  "  is  the  very  nearlv 
three-column  judge  of  the  New  York  Tribune  (May 
13).  In  Anstey's  extremely  original  and  amusing- 
novel,  The  Fallen  Idol,  a  great  effect  is  produced  bv 
the  author  insisting  on  the  perpetual  diabolic  expres- 
sion of  the  carven  image,  which  seems  to  suggest 
something  sentient,  something  at  once  living  and 
dead,  and  through  all  the  maze  of  the  story,  is  ever 
present  to  the  mind  of  the  reader.  An  exactly 
similar,  supercilious,  infernal,  immobile  smirk 
seems  immutably  fixed  on  the  physiognomy  of  this 
amiable  article.  The  author  appears  to  aim  at 
conquering,  not  by  his  facts,  which,  like  the  darkey's, 
are  false,  nor  by  his  arguments,  which  are  of  the 
infant  sciiool.  but  by  an  overbearing  smug  serenity 
of  literary  deportment,  which  is  truly  insufferable. 
He  is  calm,  he  is  satisfied,  he  is  softly  simpering,  he 
is  inexpressibly  superior,  and  he  fronts  what  he 
thinks  the  poor  little  doggish  group  of  Baconians,  as 
Memnon  fronts  the  generations.  Through  all  the 
monotonous,  imperturbable,  condesending  flow  of 
his  bland  babble  runs  still  an  under  murmur,  telling 
of  their  abjectness,  their  worthlessness,  their  insan- 
ity, their  blindness;  and  yet  they  have  seemed, 
even  to  some  of  their  antagonists,  no  inconsiderable 
beings.  We  need  not  allude  to  the  great  number  of 
intellectual  and  accomplished  men  ^nd  women  in 
private  life  Avho  accept  this  theory.  We  need  not 
even  mention  the  formal  advocates,  such  as  Delia 


MR.  DOKNELLTS  REVIEWERS.  81 

Bacon,  with  her  noble  clouded  ideality,  struck 
through  with  such  lightnings  of  insight  as  seldom 
make  splendid  any  brain ;  nor  Judge  Holmes,  with 
his  solid  learning  and  sterHng  sense,  wliose  book  a 
Tribune  reviewer  had  once  to  brassilv  falsifv  before 
he  could  even  try  to  answer;  nor  even  Mrs.  Pott, 
whose  marvelous  power  of  patient  researcli,  equal  in 
itself  to  genius,  is  coupled  with  the  most  delicate 
and  unerring  perception.  But  there  is  Leconte  de 
Lisle,  incomparable  but  for  Victor  Hugo,  among  the 
French  poets,  who  has  the  dazzling  honor  of  being 
the  successor  to  Victor  Hugo's  chair  in  tlie  French 
Academy,  and  he  has  declared  unequivocally  against 
the  Shakespereans,  There  is  Dr.  Kuno  Fischer,  of 
Heidelberg,  ilhistrious  now  above  the  modern  Ger- 
man philosophers,  as  the  expounder  of  Kant,  who, 
not  long  since,  was  announced  to  lecture  in  support 
of  the  Baconian  theory.  There  is  James  Nasm^^th, 
the  broad-brained  Scotchman,  famous  as  an  astrono- 
mer, the  inventor  of  the  steam  pile-driver,  the  steam 
hammer,  improved  ordnance,  telescopes,  what  n(jt, 
whose  practical  mind  saw  the  same  truth.  There  is 
Lord  Palraerston,  the  embodiment  of  tlie  strong 
British  common  sense,  and  he,  too,  was  a  Baconian. 
There  is  Sir  Patrick  Colquhoun,  one  of  tlie  most 
eminent  of  English  publicists,  who  has  added  his 
name  to  the  Baconian  roster  by  his  lecture,  a  couple 
of  years  since,  before  the  iloval  Society  of  Litera- 
ture in  London.  There,  as  said  already,  is  Charlotte 
Cushman,  the  powerful  actress,  whom  the  stage  and 
the  i^lay-goer  will  long  remember.  There  is  General 
Butler  (O  rare  Ben  Butler!),  whose  full  mental  worth 
will  not  be  known  until  some  publisher  has  the  wit 


8$  MR.  DONNELL  T  'S  HE  VIE  WERS. 

to  urge  him  to  collect  into  a  volume  his  trenchant 
literary  essays,  such  as  his  cogent  defense  of  the 
shmdered  B3^ron.  And  there,  to  go  no  further,  is 
that  justice  of  our  Supreme  Court,  who  most  in  mind 
resembles  Marshall,  and  who  long  since  gave  in  his 
adhesion,  on  judicial  grounds,  to  the  cause  of  Bacon. 
But  no;  the  Tribune  reviewer  sees  them  only  to 
contemn;  he  surveys  them  from  aloft,  with  his 
supercilious,  Fallen  Idol^  conceited  smirk  and  stare; 
his  style  puts  on  for  them  the  gold-rimmed  monocle, 
the  contumelious  single  eye-glass;  for  him  they  are 
"the  Baconians;"  and  with  unrelenting  calm  he 
breathes  out,  in  his  dead-level  society  voice,  that 
their  minds  are  "abnormally  constituted,''  that 
they  are  all  "  narrowness  and  triviality  ;  "  above  all. 
that  they  are  "  color-blind."  This  withering  epithet 
he  thinks  so  felicitous  that  he  repeats  it  no  less  than 
six  times  in  his  comparatively  short  article  ;  and  lest 
its  natural  force  be  al)ated,  lie  explains  that  "  mental 
color-blindness  consists  in  inability  to  distinguish 
between  strongly  o})]iosed  literary  styles;  between 
radically  different  intellectual  expressions."  Thus, 
we  suppose,  that  when  the  "abnormally  consti- 
tuted" Baconian  notes  that  Bacon  says  that 
Aristotle  thinks  young  men  unfit  to  hear  moral 
philosophy,  and  that  Shakespeare  also  says  that 
Aristotle  thinks  young  men  unfit  to  hear  moral  philos- 
ophy, and  that  the  error  of  using  the  word 
"moral"  instead  of  "political"  is  committed  by 
both  Bacon  and  Shakespeare,  it  only  shows  that  he 
is  "color-blind"  —  that  is,  unable  "to  distinguish 
between  radically  different  intellectual  expressions  !  " 
And  when  the  "  narrow  and  trivial  "  Baconian  rolls 


MR.  DOXNELLYS  REVIEWERS.  S3 

up  page  upon  page  of  twin  locutions,  epigrams, 
metaphors,  axioms,  proverbs  and  apothegms  from 
Bacon  and  Shakespeare,  which  are  palpably  diffei'ent 
modes  of  the  same  mind,  and  just  as  much  alike  as 
Bacon  speaking  prose  and  Bacon  intoning  verse, 
each  citation  only  further  shows  that  he  is  "color- 
blind"—  that  is,  unable  to  "distinguish  between 
strongly  opposed  literary  styles ! "  But  for  a  full 
rejoinder,  it  is  quite  sufficient  to  think  of  the  shining 
list  of  Baconians  I  have  named  —  Leconte  de  Lisle, 
Palmerston,  Kuno  Fischer,  ]S'asmyth,and  the  rest, — 
and  to  imagine  persons,  so  sane  and  strong  in  intel- 
lect as  they,  stigmatized  as  ''  abnormally  consti- 
tuted," full  of  "  narrowness  and  triviality,"  and  so 
"  mentally  color-blind  "  that  they  can  not  tell  one 
thino-  from  another,  all  bv  such  a  little  Hindu 
eidolon  as  this  Tribune  reviewer! 

Further  on,  with  the  air  of  one  who  has  invented 
and  orders  up  the  terrible  Zalinski  gun,  whicli  on 
its  first  trial  scooped  with  a  single  shot  a  cavern  in 
a  cliff,  he  brings  in  for  the  demolition  of  the  Bacon- 
ians, the  formidable  Dr.  Ingleby,  whom  he  calls  "  a 
ripe  Shakesperean  scholar."  To  wheel  up  and  un- 
limber  such  an  oracle  is  truly  unfortunate.  Of  all 
the  "  ripe  Shakesperean  scholars,"  Dr.  Ingleby  is  the 
one  that  has  the  least  force,  and  is  weak  even  to 
silliness.  His  quality  is  shown  by  his  most  famous 
l)ook,  the  Genturieof  Prayse,  in  which  he  aims  to 
show  how  truly  great  Shakespeare  was;  and,  indi- 
rectly, how  certainly  he  was  the  author  of  the 
plays,  by  citing  all  the  references  made  to  him,  and 
iiis  reputed  works,  during  twenty-three  years  of  his 
hfe,  and   for  seventy-seven   years   after   his  death. 


8Jt  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

Tliese  references  he  calls  "  ]iraise."  Here  are  speci- 
mens of  some  that  he  includes  under  this  title.  His 
book  not  being  at  hand,  1  quote  from'  a  volume  in 
which  they  are  collated  by  one  who  holds  him  in 
veneration. 

"  William  Payne,  in  1642,  says  '  Shakespeare's 
plays  are  better  printed  than  most  Bibles.' "    Praise ! 

"  George  Peele,  in  1G07,  mentions  '  Venus  and 
Adonis.' "     Praise ! 

"Thomas  Kobinsou,  in  1630,  describing  the  life 
of  a  monk,  says  '  After  supi)(|i'  it  is  usual  for  him 
to  read  a  little  of  Venus  and  Adonis,  or  some  such 
scurrilous  book.' "     Praise  ! 

"A  manuscript  journal  of  the  Duke  of  Wurtem- 
bergsays,  April  30,  1610,  'They  play  the  Moor  of 
Venice  at  the  Globe.'  "     More  praise  ! 

"  In  a  funeral  song  by  Sir  William  Ilarbert,  in 
1594,  Shakespeare  is  rebuked  for  going  into  foreign 
countries  for  the  subiects  of  his  verse."  Still  more 
praise ! 

"  In  Mercurius  BriUanic/us  some  one  writes,  1644, 
of  '  Ben  Jonson  and  his  uncle  Shakespeare.' " 
Praise  unspeakable ! 

There  are  a  great  many  more  entries  of  the  same 
kind.  If  such  tributes  do  not  show  Shakespeare's 
o-reatness,  and  prove  that  Lord  Bacon  did  not  write 
the  plays,  nothing  will.  Of  these  references  there 
are  185.  Fifty-seven  of  them  were  made  during 
Shakespeare's  lifetime.  Of  course  a  number  of 
them  are  comphmentary,  though,  in  nearly  every  in- 
stance, as  conventionally  so  as  stock  puffs;  and 
scarcelv  anv  of  them — even  by  hard  straining,  not 
more  than  a  dozen— refer  to  the  man,  but  only  to 


MR.  DOXNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  85 

tlie  books  ascribed  to  him.  "Wliat  their  collector 
ihinks  he  proves  b}^  them,  ami  why  the  merely  com- 
mon-place and  derogatory  ones  are  included  under 
the  caption  of  "  J'raise  "  is  a  mystery.  The  book,  in 
fact,  has  no  earthly  merit  or  significance.  It  simply 
shows  the  calibre  of  Dr.  Ingleb3\ 

A  couple  of  quotations  from  this  redoubtable 
man  are  considered  sufficient  to  crush  the  Baconians, 
including  Mr.  Donnelly.  One  is  where  he  com- 
])ares  them  to  Macadam's  sieves,  "  which  retain  only 
those  ino^redients  unsuited  to  the  end  in  view." 
This  happv  simile  is  perfectly  characteristic  of  Dr. 
f  ngleby,  and  it  is  evident  that  the  Tribune  reviewer 
admires  and  loves  him  for  its  felicity.  But  "the  end 
in  view"  is  to  macadamize  the  road,  and  does  Dr. 
i ngleby  or  the  reviewer  really  think  it  a  fault  in  the 
sieve  that  it  holds  back  the  materials  that  are  not  fit 
for  the  purpose?  It  is  a  plain  road  —  "  as  common 
as  the  wa}^  between  St.  Alban's  and  London" — 
(which  it  is  !)  and  the  Baconians  are  to  make  it  pass- 
able; is  it  cause  for  censure  that,  like  Macadam's 
sieves,  they  screen  out  only  the  proper  material  for 
the  end  in  view?  Less  commendable  surel}'^  are 
those  sieves,  not  like  Macadam's,  wherewith  Shakes- 
l^ereans  accumulate  irrelevant  and  worthless  stuff  for 
their  work,  like  the  (^enturie  ofPrayseof  Dr.  Ingleby. 

The  other  passage  which  the  reviewer  quotes, 
from  this  fine  satirist,  is  one  in  which,  to  cite  it  briefl}'", 
he  finds  Lord  Bacon  so  deficient  "  in  human  sympa- 
thies," that  he  could  not  possibly  portray  a  woman 
like  Miranda,  Perdita,  Cordelia,  or  an}/^  of  the  others; 
and  hence  to  a  "  thoi'oughly  sane  intelligence,"  mod- 
estly implied  to  l)e  the  reviewer's  own,  is  separated 


SC  Mli.  nONXEI.LY'S   ni<\  JKWKllS. 

"by  ail  impassable  gull""'  from  the  mind  that  wrote 
tlie  plays.  The  delicate  ••human  sym])athies" 
shown  by  Shakespeare  in  I'cgard  to  women,  from 
Ann  llathawa}'  to  the  wife  of  the  inn-keeper  Dave- 
nant,  are  attested  by  the  whole  tradition  about  him, 
and  of  course  prove  his  utter  qualification  for  such 
portrayals.  Strange,  however,  we  may  say  in  pass- 
ing, that  the  beautiful  passages  in  the  third  scene  of 
the. fourth  act  of  the  Winter^s  Talc^  where  the  names 
of  the  flowers,  their  character,  their  seasonable  oi'der, 
and  the  sequences  in  which  they  are  mentioned,  are 
so  much  the  same  as  in  Bacon's  essay  (hi  Gardens, 
that  the  wondrous  parallel  deeply  impressed  even 
Spedding,  who  was  no  Baconian; — strange  that  these 
])assages  are  put  into  the  mouth,  and  make  an 
integral  pai't  of  the  personality  of  the  exquisite 
Perdita,  wliom  Dr.  Inu'lebv  and  his  admirer  think 
J>acon  could  not  liave  portrayed. 

To  re-enforce  heavy  artillery  with  small  musketry 
seems  a  useless  expenditure  of  ammunition,  hut  this 
the  revieTverdoes,  by  here  bringing  in  Bichard  Grant 
AVhite  to  corroborate  Dr.  Ingleby  as  to  Bacon's  want 
of  "hunum  sympathies;'" — a  man  who,  as  I  have 
said,  was  a  secret  Baconian,  and  secret  only  because 
a  frank  avowal  of  his  disbelief  in  Shakespeare  would 
have  made  his  editions  waste  paper.  O  these  Shakes- 
pereans!  This  is  the  way  tliey  can  estimate  the 
man  who  declared  his  own  nature  when  he  wrote  in 
his  essay  on  Friendship,  ''  For  a  crowd  is  not  com- 
pany, and  men's  faces  are  but  like  pictures  in  a 
gallery,  and  talk  only  a  tinkling  cymbal,  whei-e  there 
is  no  love."  Here  is  thei]*  latest  fetch  —  to  pronounce 
"deficient  in  human  sympathies"  that  all-compas- 
sionate   Bacon    whose '  paramount   interest    was   in 


MR.  DONNELL  Y  'S  RE  VIEWERS.  S7 

liumanit}';  whose  deepest  intuitions  and  divinations, 
as  his  Essays  show,  are  when  he  comes  into  relation 
with  his  fellows ;  whose  whole  life  Avas  avowedly  and 
admittedly  devoted,  in  his  own  sublime  words,  to 
''the  relief  of  the  human  estate;"  he,  the  knight- 
errant,  solitary  and  colossal,  of  the  human  adven- 
ture ;  he,  the  very  Cid  Campeador  of  the  vast  scien- 
tific battle,  still  raging,  for  the  victory  of  the  human 
kind !  The  world  has  long  agreed  with  Yanvenar- 
gues  that  ''great  thoughts  come  from  the  heart,"  and 
to  think  that  there  should  be  men  so  dull  as  to 
set  up  that  the  great  thoughts  of  Bacon  —  none 
irreater  —  had  no  heart  to  come  from  !  The  theme  is 
too  mucli  to  handle  here,  but  the  student  of  his  life 
can  not  but  at  once  remember  some  of  its  salient 
points,  and  marvel  that  he  should  be  taxed  with  the 
lack  of  all  that  makes  a  man  most  a  man.  To  think 
of  his  fond  and  deep  rajiport  with  his  great  brother, 
Anthony  : — "  my  comfort,"  he  sweetly  calls  him  ;  and 
later  in  life,  denotes  him  with  rapt  feeling  as  "my 
dear  brother,  who  is  now  with  God."  To  think  of 
his  unfailing,  his  tender  and  anxious  efforts  to  pro- 
tect, to  succor  and  save  his  poor  young  Catholic 
friend,  the  son  of  the  Bishop  of  Durham,  Sir  Tol)ie 
Mathew  ;  how,  when  all  faces  lowered  around  the 
young  man  in  his  prison,  when  even  his  father  and 
mother  forsook  him  as  "a  pervert,"  he  would  not 
cast  him  out;  how  from  the  jail  in  which  his  con- 
science cast  him,  he  took  him  to  his  own  house  and 
cherished  him;  how  when  in  gathering  danger, 
though  innocent,  from  suspicion  of  complicity  with 
the  frightful  plot  of  Catesby  and  Guy  Fawkes,  he 
aided  his  escape  abroad ;  how  he  maintained  a  faithful 


88  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWEFiS. 

and  consolin*^-  friendship  with  the  podi'  ontlaw 
thronti-h  nil  the  vears  of  that  sorrowful  foroiiin 
sojourn;  and  liow,  at  length,  through  loyal  and  un- 
tiring endeavor,  he  procured  for  liini  permission  to 
return  to  his  own  England,  antl  eat  no  more  that 
bread  of  exile  Dante  found  so  hitter.  And  at  last, 
when  all  was  ending,  to  think  how  that  iiigh  heart 
turned  from  the  many-passioned  pageant  of  service 
and  strufi'^le  and  <»'lorv  and  nol^leanii'uish,  wliich  had 
been  his  life  on  earth,  from  all  the  airy  vision  of  his 
immeasurable  coming  fame  and  the  hopes  of 
heaven,  to  humbly  and  witli  touching  pathos  leave 
on  record  his  wish  to  be  buried  in  the  old  church  at 
St.  Albans,  for  ''  there "  he  says,  "  was  my  mother 
buried,''  and  there  he  lies  close  by  his  mother's  grave. 
O  poor,  great  man,  so  wanting  in  "  human  sym- 
pathies I " 

The  reviewer  continues  his  supercilious  l)ut  wise 
and  learned  efforts  to  wreak  mischief  on  Mr.  Don- 
nelly's book,  by  admitting  that  it  produces  "  ])lenty  " 
of  evidence  that  the  writer  of  the  plays  was  a  law- 
yer, (a  damaging  admission,  one  would  say,  for  the 
case  of  "William  Shakespeare):  hwi  thiidcs  this  coun- 
tervailed by  the  "  curiously  bad  law  in  the  Merchant 
of  Yenice^''  "  with  which,''  he  declares  ''  Ivlr.  Apple- 
ton  Morgan  has  dealt  so  fully  and  ably  that  there 
is  nothing  more  to  be  said  aljout  it."  The  refer- 
ence is  to  a  long  foot  note  which  formed  a  sad  blot 
in  Mr.'^'Morgan's  fine  book  years  ago,  and  JMr.  ]\Ior- 
gan  it  appears,  continues  to  treat  the  point  "  fully 
and  ably "  by  recently  calling  the  verdict  on  Shy- 
lock  a  "  most  illegal  and  unrighteous  judgment." 
Unrighteous  !    This  of  the  verdict  on  the  vindictive, 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWEES.  89 

tive,  carnivorous,  murder-seeking,  pound-of-flesli  old 
Jew  !  As  for  its  being  "  illegal,"  both  Mr.  Morgan 
and  the  reviewer  would  do  well  to  inquire  whether 
it  was  so  1)\^  the  legal  usage  of  an  Italian  court  of 
the  sixteenth  century.  Their  contention  is  that  the 
court  scene  in  tlie  play  sliows  ignorance  of  English 
law.  I  read  long  ago  a  full  account  of  the  trial  of 
Beatrice  Cenci,  and  such  legal  proceedings  as  passed 
in  that  Roman  court  would  certainly  seem  to  the 
Tr^'Jzme  reviewer  a  case  of  "curiously  bad  law,"  if 
judged  by  tlie  standards  of  England,  and  would  in 
that  country  be  impossible.  In  fact,  tlie  instance 
really  is  another  proof  that  tlio  w liter  of  the 
plays  was  a  master  of  jurisprudence  ;  that  he  knew, 
as  his  critics  do  not,  the  legal  usage  of  continental 
courts,  as  well  as  of  English ;  and,  most  significant 
of  all,  that  he  had  visited  Southern  Europe  witli  tlie 
eye  of  a  lawyer.  For  an  illustration  of  the  diflfer- 
ences  in  procedure,  read  Mr.  J.  T.  Doyle's  admira- 
ble paper  in  the  Overland  Monthly  for  July,  186(t, 
giving  his  curious  experience  in  a  Spanish  court  in 
Xicaraugua.  For  a  statement  of  the  legal  theory  of 
the  play  in  which  it  is  shown  how-  law.  which  is  jus- 
tice, must  be  tempered  with  equity,  which  is  mercy 
—  a  demonstration  which  only  a  mind  as  great  as 
Bacon's  in  jurisprudence  could  have  undertaken  — 
read  Judge  Holmes'  masterly  exposition  in  tlie  latest 
edition  of  his  book  on  the  Authorshljy  of  Shakes- 
peare. 

Having  settled  with  cool  nonchalance  that  the 
wi-itcr  of  the  phiys  "knew  very  little  law,''  the 
reviewer,  with  the  same  frigid  ease,  says  that  as  for 
his  "  medical  knowledf2:c.  there  is  no  reason  why  he 


no  Mli.  DONNELLY'S  REVTEWERS. 

ccHikl  not  liave  picked  that  u[) !""  I  )i'.  I>iicknill,  one  of 
the  most  eminent  of  physicians,  has  written  a  book 
on  the  m-eatness  of  that  ''  medical  knowledire," 
^\  liieh  is  rather  adverse  to  this  sage  sun^gestion.  But 
ch)ubtless  the  calm  reviewer  could  see  no  reason  Aviiy 
I)r,  Bucknill  might  not  have  "picked  up"  his 
medical  knowledge ;  and,  hard,  vulgar  study  not 
being  necessary  to  learn  the  art  of  medicine,  wh^' 
should  not  Galen  and  Hippocrates,  Rabelais  and 
Svdenham,  Abernethv  and  Astlev  Coo|)ei-,  Cabanis 
and  Brown-Sequard,  have  "  picked  up"  theirs  also  ! 
From  tiiis  serene  conclusion  it  is  l)ut  an  easy  step, 
and  with  easy  composure  is  it  taken,  to  censure 
Mr.  Donnelly  for  ascribing  to  Bacon  the  discovery 
that  heat  is  a  mode  of  motion.  The  truth  is,  he 
says,  that  "all  Bacon  knew  on  tliis  subject  he 
derived  from  Plato.''  Fulgid  Hades !  home  of 
heat,  where  cool  reviewers  go  to  when  they  die! 
Plato!  If  he  had  only  said  Aristotle,  who  reallv 
did  have  some  vague  idea,  first,  perhaps,  of  any,  of 
the  d3mamic  nature  of  heat,  though  he  does  not 
express  it  either  clearly  or  boldly  ;  but  Plato  !  Is  it, 
can  it  be  possible,  that  this  oracular  reducer  of  Bacon 
to  a  low  denomination,  does  not  know  that  the  doc- 
trine of  heat,  as  a  mode  of  motion,  is  derived  from 
the  great  crucial  illustration  of  the  working  of  the 
Baconian  method  of  discovery  in  the  Novum  Orga- 
numf  For  this  the  new  instrument  is  put  in 
motion  ;  at  the  end  of  tlie  radiant  processes  of  induc- 
tion appears  this  mngic  flower  of  flame!  See  the 
proud  and  silent  tribute  Tyndall  renders  to  Bacon, 
as  the  annunciator  of  the  idea,  when  he  prints  the 
glorious  Baconian  paragraphs  at  the  very  outset  of 
his  own  nol)le  book  on  the  subject ! 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  EEVTEWFRS.  01 

The  antarctic  airiness  of  the  hio-hlv  valuable  "  best 
judge"  of  the  Tribune  is  nowhere  more  destructive 
than  where  he  essays  to  freeze  out  the  Donnelly 
array  of  parallelisms  by  asserting  their  non-signifi- 
cance, as  evidences  of  identity  of  authorship.  It  is, 
of  course,  manifest  that  parallelisms  ma}^  be  ac- 
counted for  as  plagiarisms,  but  where  they  occur  in 
great  quantity,  as  in  Bacon  and  Shakespeare,  and 
where,  as  in  the  works  of  these  two,  they  are  no 
more  than  e(jual  to  the  remainder  of  the  text  in 
which  they  are  embedded,  such  an  explanation  of 
their  presence  is  perfectly  untenable.  For  example, 
the  elegant  poems  of  Owen  Meredith  are  really 
wonderful  for  plagiarism;  he  steals  right  and  left 
from  the  British  poets,  and  from  the  French,  Italian 
and  Slavic  poets  ;  but  we  know  that  his  parallelisms 
are  plagiarisms,  not  only  because  avc  find  them 
in  the  pages  Avhence  he  a[)pro)))'iated  them,  but 
because,  though  his  own  poetry  has  merit,  the 
splendid  sentences  and  phrases  he  has  taken  shine 
in  it  like  jewels  in  an  ash-pan,  and  ai-e  out  of  conso- 
nance "with  their  surroundings.  It  is  not  so  with 
the  parallelisms  of  Bacon  and  Shakespeare,  and  hei'c 
Mr.  Donnelly  is  plainlv  rigid.  lie  miglit  advance 
it  as  an  unanswerable  reason  why  he  is  right,  that 
tlie  identity  of  the  passages  is  significant  of  a  single 
authorship,  not  alone  because  the}"  are  identical,  but 
because  they  comport  in  both  cases  with  all  of  the 
context;  grow  inevitably  out  of  it  instead  of  being 
Inserted  or  stuck  on  ;  are  never  above  or  below  it ; 
achieve  originality  by  sheer  appositeness ;  and,  in 
short,  have,  in  each  composition,  a  perfect  mutuality 
of  relation  to  the  whole.     It  is.  therefore,  far  more 


92  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVTEWEES. 

icily  superior  than  irrefragable,  in  Uie  Tribune  re- 
viewer, to  consider  Mr.  Donnelly's  book  as  "  a  study 
in  morbid  psychology,"  and  he  himself  as  one  to  be 
valued  onl}'^  ""  for  therapeutic  purposes,"  because  he 
ranks  as  evidences  the  autorial  identities  lie  finds- 
Nor  has  the  reviewer  even  any  right,  in  I'eason,  to 
push  these  supercilious  and  insolent  phi-ases  to  the 
length  of  stigmatizing  as  "  incredible  absurdity  "  Mr. 
Donnelly's  suggestion,  (it  is  hardly  more,  and  only 
voices  what  several  of  us  have  long  thought  antl 
some  said),  that  Bacon  is  the  real  author  behind 
Marlowe,  Burton  and  Montaigne.  Scholars  who  are 
not  Baconians  have  for  a  great  while  been  strangely 
stirred  by  what  seemed  the  vast  anticipation  of 
Shakespeare  in  Marlowe's  pages,  shown  always  in 
the  large  rhythms  of  the  Marlovian  plays  ;  and  at 
times  in  striking  similarities  of  thought,  cadence, 
and  imagery.  It  is  not  time  yet  to  pronounce  abso- 
lutely, but  the  learned  mind  of  Bacon  is  seen  pal- 
pably, though  in  negligee,  in  the  Anatomy  of  Mekm- 
choly.,  a  book  originally  issued  anonymously.  As 
for  Montaigne's  Essays.,  the  evidences  of  Bacon's 
hand  in  them  are  so  strong,  so  numerous,  and  so  for- 
tified by  external  circumstances,  that  I  sometimes 
wonder  anyone  can  doubt  their  indication.  "What 
does  the  great  Dutch  Scholar,  Isaac  Gruter,  the  au- 
thor of  the  Inscriptions.,  writing  in  a  singular  veiled 
style  from  The  Hague  to  Dr.  Eawley,  Bacon's  chap- 
lain, a  little  while,  apparently,  after  Bacon's  death, 
concerning  the  publication  of  several  of  his  works  in 
Holland — what  does  he  refer  to  when  he  speaks  of 
"  the  French  interpreter  who  patched  together  Lord 
Bacon's  things  and  tacked  that  motley  piece  to  him  ;" 


A  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  9S 

and  in  the  next  sentence  hopes  to  get  leave  to  pub- 
lish '•  apart,  that  exotic  work  "  of  his  lordship's  ? 
What  is  Lord  Bacon  s  "  exotic  "  work,  which  has  "  a 
motley  piece  tacked  to  it "  by  "  a  French  inter- 
preter ? "  Lest  the  reviewer  should  lose  his  beauti- 
ful, immobile,  contumelious  smile  by  a  change  of 
countenance,  I  recommend  him  not  to  be  too  positive 
that  that  work  is  not  the  so-called  Essays  of  Mon- 
taigne, for  the  contrary  might  be  proved  on  him. 

There  is  nothing  else  worth  remark  in  his  criti- 
cism, except  that  he  continues  for  more  than  a  col- 
umn to  the  end,  the  supercilious  assumption  of  cold 
superiority  which  alone  gives  such  speciousness  to 
his  shallow  and  impudent  platitudes,  as  enables  them 
to  injure  Mr.  Donnell^'^'s  book  wath  the  public.  The 
value  of  this  final  column  may  be  estimated  by  the 
fact  that,  in  a  large  part  of  it,  his  serene  thought  butts 
about,  like  a  summer  beetle  in  a  dim  room,  trying  to 
show  that  the  typographical  peculiarities  of  the  folio 
are  not  the  conditions  of  a  cipher,  a  point  which 
distinguished  cryptologists  have  already  disposed 
of  for  him.  Further  on,  with  the  lofty  and  com- 
passionate air  of  one  who  would  set  the  poor 
idiot  rio-ht,  he  utters  the  incredible  and  self-evident 
absurdity  that,  unless  Bacon  set  up  the  type  wnth  his 
own  hands  and  then  read  the  proofs,  he  could  not 
have  got  a  cipher  narrative  into  the  folio  without 
letting  "the  whole  chapel"  into  the  secret.  He 
says  this,  but  he  knows  very  well  that  if  his  own 
paper,  the  7V^J?m<?,  accepted  for  print  an  article  four 
columns  long,  every  tenth  word  in  it  might  make  it 
a  cipher  narrative  without  any  one  in  the  office,  from 
the  editors  to  the  press-boys,  even  suspecting  its  true 


OU  MB.  D  ONNEL  L  Y  'S  RE  VIE  WERS. 


character.  In  the  case  put  by]\I)'.  Donnell}^  letone 
Avcll-paid  agent,  like  Jleniinge,  be  cliarged  by  Bacon 
to  faithfully  tee  that  the  printers  follo\A'ed  copy,  and 
without  his  knowing  anything  whatever  of  the 
secret  writing  they  were  putting  in  ty])e,  the  thing 
would  be  done.  The  reviewer's  ensuing  account  of 
the  capriciousness  and  complexity  of  tiie  cipher 
method,  and  his  utterly  unwarrantable  assertion  that 
the  words  of  the  text  are  selected  to  fit  a  precon- 
ceived stor}^  are  plain  falsifications,  upon  which  Mi'. 
Donnelly's  subsequent  disclosure  of  the  method  by 
which  his  basic  numbers  and  their  modifiers  are 
obtained,  sets  an  ineffaceable  bi-and.  The  same 
disclosure  brings  to  utter  mockery  the  crowning 
folly  of  the  article,  where  he  impressively  parades, 
with  a  sort  of  veneration,  the  conclusion  reached 
by  Mr.  Jennings  in  the  Post-Despatch;  and  declares, 
with  an  indescribable  air  of  finality,  that  the 
cijilier  has  been  proved  to  be  delusive  nonsense 
l)y  that  gentleman,  with  his  precious  discoverv  of 
the  concealed  primary  number  222,  and  its  "buoy- 
iint  and  beautiful  little  modifier,  the  figure  one." 
Considering  that  it  has  l:)een  thoroughly  exploded 
by  the  facts,  it  is  really  edifying  to  see  the 
reviewer's  cold  and  uppish  confidence  in  the  bursted 
bladder,  and  his  tranquil  assumption  that  it  has 
alreadv  destroyed  the  Donnelly  volume.  Why  he 
should  condescend  to  say  any  more  after  this,  is  not 
known,  but  he  does,  and  actually,  for  a  brief  space,  gets 
very  mad  at  Mr.  Donnelly,  though  still  preserving  a 
horrible  immobility  in  his  fury,  charging  that  he  has 
made  of  Bacon  in  the  cipher  story  an  archaic 
prototype  of   Dr.    Jekyll   and    Mr.   Hyde;    "noble, 


MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  95 

magnanimous,  lofty-minded  "  in  the  argument,  but  in 
the  cipher,  "  the  basest,  meanest,  most  slanderous, 
malevolent  and  sneaking  of  backbiters  and  calumni- 
ators." Phew!  This  touch  brino's  to  mind  the 
scene  in  the  Fallen  Idol.,  where  the  abominable  little 
image,  keeping  its  movelessness  of  visage,  its  satur- 
nine dead  smirk,  and  its  general  impassibility,  actu- 
ally yowls  with  rage  at  the  attempt  to  bury  it.  The 
spurt  of  epithets,  which  corresponds  in  the  reviewer 
to  this  dismal  cry,  is  all  because  the  cipher  contains 
incidentally,  in  the  very  spirit  of  history,  some  details 
of  the  dissolute  life  of  Sliakespeare.  But  what  if 
these  details  are  true, —  and  tradition  certainly  con- 
firms them  ; — are  Suetonius  and  Tacitus  to  be  set 
down  as  sneaking  backbiters  and  calumniatoi's  be- 
cause they  record  the  faults  and  follies  of  some  of 
their  contem])oraries?  Further  on,  tlie  cipher  story 
is  characterized  as  a  "scandalous  clironicle,"  thougli 
it  contains  nothing  either  in  quaUty  or  quantity  that 
sets  it  below  the  immortal  memoirs  of  Sully.  Of 
course,  what  it  has,  of  this  kind,  is  but  a  very  small 
part  of  the  cipher  story  given,  but  the  ingenuous 
reviewer  is  careful  to  suppress  this  truth,  lest  it 
might  seriously  qualify  the  appositeness  of  his  flour- 
ish about  Jekyll  and  Hyde. 

X. 

The  somewhat  extended  going-over  to  which  this 
one  of  "  the  best  judges,*'  credited  with  having  killed 
Mr.  Donnelly's  book,  has  been  subjected,  in  common 
with  several  of  his  fellow  "  judges,"  is  undertaken  to 
show  what  kind  of  men  have  the  reviewer's  privilege  ; 
and  what  kind   of  I'epresentations  they  dare  to  put 


96  MPi.  DONNELL  Y  'S  RE  VIE  WERS. 

forth  in  condemnation  of  the  toilsome  and  valuable 
work  of    a  rej)utable   author.     If   I   were  in   Mr. 
Donnell3''s   ]ilace,   I   would  publish   these  reviews, 
without  comment,  as  a  supplement  to  every  future 
copy  of  the  Great  Cryptogram,  that  the  reader  rising 
from  its  pages  (which  he  would  with  at  least  deep 
res]iect  and  probably  conviction)  might  see  for  him- 
self the  glaring  mendacity  of  their  account  of  the 
book  ho  had  Just  perused.     No  comment  of  mine 
could  have  the  force  of  such  a  contrast.     The  articles 
referi-ed  to  here  are  sam))les  of  a  number  of  others, 
equally  despicable,  which  have  been  evoked  by  this 
strong    and   splendid   volume.     Most   of  them   are 
nearly  or  (piite  destitute  of  even  average  literarv 
merit,  uot  to  say  of  any  gleam  of  the  point  and 
grace  of  manner  which  often  adorn  and  half  redeem 
the  unscrupulous  and  shameless  reviews  frecpient  in 
the   periodicals    of    Europe.     They    are   woven   of 
misrepresentations,    and,  at   best,  succeed   only   by 
blocking  up  into  high  relief  a  few  petty  flaws  and 
errors,  which  are  non-significant,  and  making  them 
stand  for  the  character  of  the  whole  work.     Bv  such 
tricks,    which    only   the   professional   reviewer  can 
practice,  they  contrive  to  give  the  reader,  who  is 
simple   enough  to  pay  any  attention  to  them,  an 
impression  of   the   book   such  as  he   would   never 
receive,  even  though  hostile  or  prejudiced,  from  an 
independent   perusal.    This   latest   instance   of   the 
ability  of  their  writers  to  make  one  thing  take  on 
the  semblance  of  another,  makes  me  feel,  as  I  have 
been  ofteu  made  to  feel,  the  sober  force  of  Sweden- 
Ijorg's  iron  e])ithet,  when  he  calls  the   whole  tril)e 
conjurers.  False,  even  to  utter  worthlessness,  as  their 


ME.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS.  97 

report  of  an  author's  work  may  be,  it  lias  the 
infernal  quality  of  a  glamour,  which  deceives  even 
people  of  fair  intelligence,  and  can  often  effect 
measureless  injury.  A  gentleman  who  is  by  no 
means  a  fool,  recentlv  writes  :  "  I  was  much  inter- 
ested  in  tiie  Great  Cryptogram.^  and  intended  to 
secure  an  early  copy,  but  have  read  a  very  adverse 
review  of  it  in  one  of  the  great  ISTew  York  journals 
and  have  therefore  concluded  not  to  make  the 
purchase."  Here  is  an  instance  of  the  practical 
operation  of  tlie  institution.  The  impressive  repre- 
sentations of  an  asinine  Ananias,  masquerading  as  a 
critic,  were  accepted  i)y  him  without  suspicion  ;  and 
he  was  deterred  from  procuring  a  valuable  book, 
which  undoubtedly  would  have  given  him  full  satis- 
faction. Multiply  the  instance  by  thousands,  and 
you  liave  an  idea  ^^l  the  injustice  wrought  by  the 
system  of  reviewing. 

Tiie  deprivation  to  tlie  general  reader,  and  the 
pecuniary  injury  to  the  author  and  publisiier,  are 
aUke  evident.  One  does  not  forget  Emerson's  radiant 
first  volume,  Nature,  consigned  to  tlie  publishers' 
shelves,  as  Theodore  Parker  said,  for  twelve  years 
—  hardly  a  copy  of  the  wdiole  edition  sold- — owing 
to  the  liocus-pocus  of  tlie  critical  representations. 
Who  among  the  I'eaders  that  have  felt  the  transfig- 
uration of  that  volume, —  felt  its  effect  upon  the  soul, 
as  of  a  holy  and  immeasurable  dawn, —  would  not 
rank  it  as  among  one  of  life's  losses  if  he  had  been 
kept  from  its  sweet  influences  by  having  received 
the  false  impressions  spread  abroad  by  periodical 
criticism?  It  is  idle  to  lay  the  blame  upon  the 
reader,  and  say  that  he  ought  not   to    be   unduly 


98  MR.  DON  NELL  Y'S  RE  VIE  WERS. 

affecteil  by  what  the  critic  says  of  a  volume.  As 
things  are,  the  best  of  us  are  attracted  or  deterred 
by  what  is  pkiusibiy  reported  of  a  book  by  a  re[)U- 
table  critical  journal;  andean  be  cheated  in  two 
ways,  either  unjustly  in  its  favor  oi-  unjustly  against 

it. 

As  for  the  publishers,  who  are  business  men,  I 
wonder  that  on  mere  business  grounds  they  put  up 
with  the  treatment  they  often  receive  from  these 
road-agents.  I  personally  know  of  one  recent  in- 
stance—and doubtless  the  instances  are  many — 
where  a  pile  of  freshly  issued  books  was  made  over, 
every  week,  by  the  managing  editor  to  his  salaried 
reviewer,  with  strict  instructions  not  to  praise  them, 
whatever  their  merit — without  special  instructions! 
lA^avino-  the  rig-hts  and  interests  of  the  author  out 
of  the  (piestion,  what  sort  of  a  chance  to  do  business 
has  a  publisher,  subjected  to  such  treatment  as  this? 
At  best,  even  when  the  dice  are  not  thus  loaded,  the 
books  of  whose  character  the  public  is  to  be  informed, 
are  at  the  mercy  of  a  critic  whose  temper,  qualifica- 
tions and  conditions  are,  like  himself,  unknown. 
Under  our  practice,  the  verdict  on  an  eternal  book, 
like  Don  Quixote,  Robinson  Crusoe,  or  Les  IliseraUes, 
which  can  only  be  justly  made  by  "  the  great  variety 
of  readers,"  is  confided  to  a  single,  often  anonymous, 
irresponsible  man,  whose  dictum  is  to  be  accepted  by 
thousands.  There  could  be  no  better  premium  on 
adverse  judgments.  The  critic  may  be  an  evil  man, 
whose  excellent  digestion  only  stimulates  his  literary 
malignity  ;  or  he  may  be  a  good  man,  whose  view^  of 
the  work  before  him  is  poisoned  by  a  dyspepsia 
which  makes  him  feel  that  he  has  breakfasted  daily 


MB.  n OXNELL  Y'S  REYIE WEES.  99 

on  a  fried  handsaw,  split  up  the  back,  and  a  half 
dozen  of  stewed  gimlets.  He  may  be  a  dunce,  a 
sciolist,  a  snarley3'ow%  a  dullard,  a  persilieur,  an  ossi- 
fied intelligence,  a  born  Philistine,  a  man  without 
perception  or  i"eceptivity,  generosit}^  or  equity  ;  one 
subject  to  his  humors,  to  moods  of  resistance  or 
caprice,  to  insomnia  or  east  winds.  In  any  of  winch 
cases  the  fate  of  the  book  he  is  to  judge,  is  in  the 
hands  of  a  citizen  of  Lvford  or  Jedburoh,  and  jrets 
hanged  first  to  be  tried  afterward.  Xow  the  pub- 
lisher of  that  book  has  put  his  money  in  it.  To  him 
it  is  rightfully  nothing  but  a  commoditv,  which  he 
has  to  sell  in  the  worldh'  interest  of  the  author  and 
his  own.  Should  the  obscure  manikin,  who  does  the 
reviewing,  use  his  unjust  and  tremendous  opportunity 
and  set  the  public  dead  against  it,  the  sales  are 
blocked,  no  matter  what  its  merit;  the  publisher 
loses  his  investment,  and  the  author  his  reward.  It 
is  a  direct  injury,  base  and  unwarrantable,  to  a  legiti- 
mate business  interest;  and,  as  I  have  said,  I  wonder 
that  publishers  put  up  with  it.  Tlie  quality  of  the 
literary  commodity  they  offer  is  almost  wholly  a 
matter  of  opinion,  and  I  see  no  equity  in  an  institu- 
tion which  is  arranged  to  sacrifice,  to  the  mere 
opinion  of  a  single  Avriter,  often  venal  and  oftener 
stupid,  the  material  interests  of  business  men. 
Would  any  other  mercantile  or  trading  enterprise 
think  itself  fairly  served  by  such  organized  raiding 
on  its  rights,  or  endure  the  pecuniary  loss  involved? 
Perhaps,  however,  logic  being  logic,  this  is  what  we 
must  come  to.  To  be  consistent,  we  must  see  that 
all  merchants  who  have  wares  to  sell,  are  subjected  to 
mendacious  "  literary  criticism."  adorned  with  sucli 


100  MR.  DONNELLY'S  REVIEWERS. 

rlietoriciil  phrases  of  defamation  as  glow  in  the 
critical  essays  on  Mr.  Donnelly's  volume.  One  emi 
nent  journa],  Avith  an  audience  of  half  a  million,  will 
keep  an  assassin  who  will  devote  two  columns  to  the 
])roposilion,  fluently  and  plausibly  stated,  that  a 
resjiectable  gi'ocei",  '"  through  unconscious  cerebra- 
tion," oiTei's  for  sale  flour  which  is  full  of  chalk. 
Another  journal  as  eminent,  and  as  widely  circulated, 
will  demonstrate  in  three  and  a  half  colunms,  that 
his  coffee  is  \v holly  made  up  of  roasted  beans,  and  is 
"  valuable  onl\'  for  therapeutic  purposes."  A  third 
authority,  widely  in  vogue,  will  have  four  columns 
to  assert  that  being  "  unable  to  distinguish  between 
intellectual  colors,''  he  confounds  the  substance  of 
the  beach  with  pure  Muscovado,  and  sands  his  sugar. 
And  a  fourth,  which  reaches  nearly  all  the  popula- 
tion, will  have  five  columns,  to  prove  that  after  temper- 
ing the  molasses  with  mucilage  and  water,  he  never 
goes  up  to  famil}'  prayers,  and  is  considerably  worse 
than  Colonel  Ingersoll.  How  will  the  honest  grocer 
of  the  future  like  such  an  instituted  freedom  of  the 
press,  when  it  thus  decries  his  goods  and  hurts  his 
business  ?  But  the  grocers  are  safe  ;  it  is  only  the 
publishers, —  agents  for  the  authors, —  for  whom  the 
case  is  possible.  Miserable  anarchist  I  To  think 
that  books  should  have  the  same  right  to  unimpeded 
sales  as  groceries!  To  claim  that  a  publisher's  sales 
should  not  be  lessened,  nor  an  author's  heart  dark- 
ened, by  ''  independent  criticism  ! " 

Better  that  books  should  never  be  noticed  at  all  — 
better  that  even  fine  critics,  like  Ste.  Beuve,  like 
Emile  Montegut  or  Paul  St.  Yictor,  like  Mathew 
Arnold,  like  George  Saintsbury  or  Professor  JMinto, 


MR.  U ONNELL  Y  '8  RE  VIE  WER8.  lul 

should  break  their  pens  and  close  their  inkstands 
forever — than  let  continue  a  literary  usage  which 
intercepts  the  reader  on  his  way  to  the  volume,  and 
turns  hira  from  it  by  shameful  defamation.  It  is  a 
usaoe  which  has  become  o-eneral,  and  has  reached 
the  dimensions  of  a  serious  harm  to  literature.  In 
the  case  of  Mr.  Donnelly's  important  production,  for 
one  serious  and  honest  estimate,  like  the  just,  tem- 
perate, kintily  and  altogether  admirable  notice  Mr. 
Medill  gave  it  in  the  Chicago  Trilune,  there  have 
been  fifty  of  the  worst  character.  This  is  about  the 
proportion  of  exception  which  exists  in  the  infamous 
rule.  I  think  the  needed  remedv  for  such  a  condi- 
tion  is  to  sujipress  the  professional  functionary  of 
the  critical  periodicals,  with  his  dogmatic  lying- 
oracles,  and  sul)stitute  the  free  champions  of  the 
pro  and  con.  All  the  reading  public  wants  and 
needs  in  criticism,  is  to  hear  what  can  be  said,  the 
stronger  the  better,  both  for  and  against,  the 
product  of  an  author's  thought  or  imagination. 
The  ideal  of  a  critical  journal  is  a  publication  which 
shall  be  an  arena  for  discussion,  in  which  all  that 
can  be  uttered,  on  every  side  of  a  theme,  shall  be  ex- 
pressed on  the  single  condition  of  proper  literary 
ability.  A  journal  governed  by  such  a  principle,  is, 
I  believe,  demanded  by  the  democratic  genius  of 
this  country,  and  by  all  interests,  including  those  of 
literature.  In  every  domain  of  our  national  intel- 
lectual activity,  the  one  imperative  requisite  is  Light. 
To  this,  in  literature,  the  present  institution  of 
reviewing  is  a  fatal  barrier. 


THE  GREAT  CRYPTOGRAM 

FRANCIS  BACON'S  CIPHER  IN  THE  SHAKES- 
PEARE  PLAYS. 


BY 


IGNATIUS    DONNELLY, 

Author  of  "Atlantis,  The  Antediluvian  World,"  atid  " Ragnarok, 
The  Age  of  Fire  and  Oraiiel." 


NEARLY  all  great  discoveries  have  been  received  with  incredu- 
lity, and  it  is  not  to  be  wondered  at,  therefore,  that  Ignatius 
Donnelly's  announcement  that  he  had  found  a  cipher  in  the 
Shakespeare  Plays  should  have  subjected  him  to  unfair  attacks 
in  the  public  journals,  even  though  eminent  mathematicians, 
after  thorough  examination,  had  indorsed  his  claims.  In  spite  of 
adverse  criticism,  however,  and  on  its  merits  alone,  Mr.  Donnelly's 
great  work  is  steadily  gaining  in  popularity,  and  eminent  men 
everywhere,  convince(3  by  his  arguments,  are  gradually  creating 
a  change  in  popular  opinion.  The  mere  fact  that  Prof.  Elias 
Colbert,  in  his  character  as  a  mathematician,  has  indorsed  the 
cipher,  is  a  sufficient  certificate  of  its  validity.  The  same  is  true 
of  Mr.  George  Parker  Bidder,  who  is  as  eminent  as  he  is  unbiased, 
ranking,  as  he  does,  the  first  mathematician  of  England.  The 
decisions  of  these  men  cannot  rightly  be  regarded  as  opinions. 
They  are  the  decrees  of  science. 


"NO  BOOK  of  modern  times  has  excited  so  mucli  interest  all  over  the 
civilized  world  as  this  volume,  and  its  sale  will  probably  reach 
a  million  copies."— j.Vt'it^  York  Morninu  Journal. 

"THE  MOST  startling  announcement  that  has  been  hurled  at  mankind 
since  Galileo  proclaimed  his  thcorj-  of  the  earth's  motion."  Xeiv 
Yiirlc  World. 

"IT  INVOLVES  the  most  interesting  literarj'  possibility  of  our  genera- 
tion."— Julian  Hawthorne. 

"I  KNOW  all  about  Gov.  Donnelly,  and  I  am  verj-  sure  that  he  has  dis- 
covered all  he  claims.  I  am  a  tirm  beliexer  in  the  Baconian  theory." 
—  Benjamin  F.  Butler. 

"I  SAY  without  hesitation  that  I  am  obliged  to  endorse  the  claim  made 
by  Donnelly  that  he  has  found  a  cipher  in  some  of  the  Shakespeare 
Plays.  *  ♦  *  The  cipher  is  there,  as  claimed,  and  he  has  done 
enough  to  pro\e  its  existence  to  my  satisfaction. "-Pro/.  Elias 
Colbert,  Astronomer  and  Mathematician. 


THIS  extraordinary  book  has  been  the  subject  of  so  much  discussion, 
both  in  Europe  and  America,  tiiat  the  notices  ot  it  in  magazines, 
reviews  and  newspapers  would  till  several  volumes.  Never  has  any 
book  been  so  heralded  by  the  curiosity  ol  the  world. 

And  this  is  not  to  be  wondered  at.  The  author  has  I'ound  in  the 
Shakespeare  Plays  a  cipher  story,  curiously  infolded  in  the  text,  holding 
a  certain  uniform  relation  to  the  paging  of  the  great  Folio  of  16»3,  and 
the  beginnings  and  ends  of  acts,  scenes,  etc. 

'Ihis  work  upon  which  Governor  Donnelly  has  been  engaged  for  so 
many  years  is  now  fairly  before  the  world  on  its  merits.  His  discovery 
is  now,  and  will  continue  to  be,  the  chief  topic  of  general  discussion 
anmng  educated  people. 

The  key  to  the  cipher  and  the  text  of  the  secret  narrative  disclosed 
by  it  is  made  vniblic  only  in  "The  Great  Cryptoguam."  As  to  the 
actuality  of  the  cipher,"  says  Governor  Donnelly  in  the  Preface  of  his 
great  work,  "there  can  be  but  one  conclusion.  A  loiiij  continmms  tiar- 
rat  ve  runnituj  thnmolt  inauy  pdycs,  dctailiinj  historical  events  in  a  per- 
JettUi  S!iminet7icat,  iltctoricul,  {jraiiiinatical  inmnier,  and  ctUvays  yrmviiig 
out  of  tlic  same  itumtKt.-i,  unphojid  in  ihi  same  uny,  and  cou)Uino  from  the 
same  or  similar  startiKO-points,  cannot  he  otherwise  tlian  a  prearranged 
arithmetieal  cipJier.  Let  those  who  would  deny  this  produce  a  single 
page  of  a  connectid  story,  eliminated  bj-  an  arithmetical  I'ule  from  any 
other  work;  in  fact,,  let  them  tind  five  words  that  will  cohere,  by  acci- 
dent, in  due  order,  in  any  p\iblication  where  thej'  were  not  first  placed 
with  intent  and  afoi-ethought.  1  have  never  yet  been  able  to  find 
three  such." 

Governor  Donnelly  also  says : 

"The  Key,  turned  for  tlie  first  time  in  the  secret  wards  of  the  cipher,  will  yet  unlock 
a  vast  history,  nearly  as  great  iu  bulk  as  the  Plays  themselves,  and  tell  a  mighty  story  uf 
one  of  the  greatest  and  most  momentous  eias  of  human  history,  illuminated  by  the 
most  gifted  human  being  that  has  ever  dwelt  upon  the  earth.        «         «         *         ♦         • 

"I  have  no  hesitation  in  saying  that  the  publication  of  my  book  will  convince  the 
world  th;,t  these  plays  are  Ihe  most  marvelous  specimens  of  ingenuity,  and  mental 
suppleness,  and  adrt)itness,  to  say  nothing  of  genius,  power,  and  attainments,  ever  put 
together  by  the  wit  of  man.  There  is  no  parallel  for  them  on  earth.  There  never  will  be. 
No  such  man  can  ever  again  be  born.  His  coming  marked  an  era  in  the  history  of  the 
world." 

Apart  from  the  cipher  discovery,  The  Great  Cryptogram  would, 
by  its  facts  and  arguments,  create  a  revolution  in  public  opinion  as  to 
the  authorship  of  the  Shakespeare  Plays.  1 1  is  a  profoiuid  and  exhaust- 
ive argument,  presented  in  that  forcible  yet  fascinating  style  for  which 
the  author  is  noted. 

The  Great  "Cryptogram"  is  published  in  one  imperial  octavo  vol- 
ume of  nearly  l.COO  pages.  The  illustrations  include  a  steel  portrait  of  Lord 
Bacon,  from  the  painting  of  Van  Somer ;  portraits  of  Queen  Elizabeth, 
of  the  Earl  of  Essex,  and  of  Ben  Jonsoi:,  and  portraits  of  the  leading 
"Baconians."  It  contains  also  a  fac-simile  of  the  famous  Shakespeare 
portrait  printed  as  a  frontispiece  to  the  great  Folio  of  1623,  and  fac- 
similes of  the  text  of  that  great  work,  engraved  by  photographic  process 
from  a  perfect  and  authentic  copy  of  the  same  in  the  Library  of  Colum- 
bia College.  » 

The  title  and  semi-titles  are  engraved  on  wood,  from  original  designs, 
in  antiiiuc  style,  and  the  letter-press  is  from  electrotype  plates  cast  from 
new  type. 

Tlie  work  is  printed  on  an  e.xtra  quality  of  calendered  paper,  and 
will  l)e  furnished  to  subscribers  at  the  following  prices : 

Plain  Edition.— In  extra  English  cloth,  stamped  in  maroon  and 

gold,  uniiiue  design,  plain  edges $4  50 

Popular  Edition.     In  extra  English  cloth,   gold   and   maroon 

.stamping,  full  gilt  edges 6  50 

Library  Edition.-  Tn  half  seal  lliissia,  burnished  edges,   gold 

iiiedalliiiii  ])()rtrait  of  Lord  Bacon  on  side 6  50 

Presentation  Edition. ^In  full  seal  Russia,  full  gilt  edges 8  .50 

In  territory  where  we  have  no  agent,  wo  will  supply  The  Gre.at 

Cryptogka.m  at  $2.50  in  Cloth.       Address  all  orders  to 

R.  S.  PEALE  &  CO.,  Publishers, 

315-321  WABASH  AVENUE,  CHICAGO. 


RAGNAROK: 

THE   AGE    OE   EIRE    AND   GRAVEL. 


liY 


IGNATIUS    DONNELLY, 

Author  of  ^'Atlantis,  the  Antediluvian  World, 'Wind  ''■The  Great 

Cryiit()<jr(un  :  FrKucia  B((Con''H  Ci/dwr  in  the 
S/i((lesji('<tre  Pliri/s. " 


With  Illustrations,      .        .       i2mo,  Vellum  Cloth,  $2.00. 


'"T^HE  title  of  this  book  is  taken  from  the  Scandinavian  sagas, 
1  or  legends,  and  means  'the  darkness  of  the  gods.'  The 
work  consists  of  a  chain  of  arguments  and  facts  to  prove  a  series 
of  extraordinary  theories,  viz. :  That  the  Drift  Age,  with  its  vast 
deposits  of  clay  and  gravel,  its  decomposed  rocks,  and  its  great 
rents  in  the  face  of  the  globe,  was  the  result  of  contact  between 
the  earth  and  a  comet,  and  that  the  Drift-material  was  brought  to 
the  earth  by  the  comet ;  that  man  lived  on  the  earth  at  that  time  ; 
that  he  was  highly  civilized  ;  that  all  the  human  family,  with  the 
exception  of  a  few  persons  who  saved  themselves  in  caves,  perished 
from  the  same  causes  which  destroyed  the  mammoth  and  the 
other  pre-glacial  animals ;  that  the  legends  of  all  the  races  of  the 
world  preserve  references  to  and  descriptions  of  this  catastrophe ; 
that  following  it  came  a  terrible  age  of  ice  and  snow,  of  great 
floods  while  the  clouds  were  restoring  the  waters  to  the  sea,  and 
an  age  of  darkness  while  the  dense  clouds  infolded  the  globe. 
These  startling  ideas  are  supported  by  an  array  of  scientific  facts, 
and  by  legends  drawn  from  all  ages  and  all  regions  of  the  earth." 
"  Ragxahok"  supplies  a  new  theory  as  to  the  origin  of  the 
Glacial  Age,  coherent  in  all  its  parts,  plausible,  not  opposed  to 
any  of  the  teachings  of  modern  science,  and  curiously  supported 
by  the  traditions  of  mankind.  If  the  theory  is  true,  it  will  be 
productive  of  far-reaching  consequences  ;  it  will  teach  us  to  look 
to  cosmical  causes  for  many  things  on  the  earth  which  we  have 
heretofore  ascribed  to  telluric  causes,  and  it  will  revolutionize 
the  present  science  of  geology. 


•     PRESS   OPINIONS    • 


"It  is  impossible  to  withhold  respect  for  the  ingenious  log^io  and 
industrious  scholarship  which  mark  its  pages."—  Chicago  Tribune. 

*'  This  theory is  set  forth  with  the  dexterity  and  earnestness 

with  which,  in  a  previous  work,  the  author  tried  to  prove  the  whilom 
existence  of  the  fabled  Atlantis,  and  it  is  equally  certain  to  rouse  the 
curiosity  and  enchain  the  attention  of  a  large  body  of  readers."— ^'ew 
York  Sun. 

"Whatever  may  be  the  .iudgment  concerning  the  scientific  value  of 
Mr.  Donnelly's  'Ragnarok,'  no  one  can  read  it  without  a  thrill  of 
excited  interest.    It  has  a  primeval  sensationalism."-  BoMon  Tranle.r. 

"The  work  is  marvelous  if  true,  and  almost  equally  marvelous  if  not 
true."—  Baltimore  Day. 

"All  is  interesting,  seemingly  jilausiblc,  and  certainly  informing."— 
Boston  Commomrealth. 

"  Wholly  interesting,  and  in  some  respects  as  thrilling  and  as  enter- 
taining as  the  most  absorbing  romances."—  Boston  Oozcttc. 

"The  book  altogether  is,  perhaps,  the  most  interesting  one  of  the 
year."— flarf/ord  Times. 

"It  is  as  entertaining  and  fascinating  as  a  novel."'— Christian  at 
Work. 

"A  vast  amount  of  curious  information  has  been  gathered  into  its 
pages."—  Cincinnati  Gazette. 

"No  mere  summary  can  do  justice  to  this  extraordinary  book,  which 
certainlj'  contains  many  strong  arguments  against  the  generally  accepted 
theory  that  all  the  gigantic  phenomena  of  the  Drift  were  due  to  the 
action  of  ice.  Whether  reatlers  believe  Mr.  Donnelly  or  not,  they  will 
find  his  book  intensely  interesting."—  I7(c  Guardian,  Banlmry,  Enylanil. 

"  It  is  one  of  the  most  powerful  and  suggestive  books  of  the  day,  and 
deserves  resjiectful  attention,  not  only  from  the  general  reader  Viut 
from  the  scientist."-  T/ic  Continent. 

"  Mr.  Donnelly  can  claim  the  credit  of  furnishing  a  theory  which  is 
consistent  with  itself,  and,  as  he  evidently  thinks,  with  the  scientific 
requirements  of  the  problem,  and  also  with  the  teachings  of  Holy  iSci'ip- 

ture The  book  is  well  worth  studying.     If  it  is  true,  it  answers 

two  very  important  purposes  — the  first  connected  with  science,  and  the 
second  with  prophecy.  It  gives  a  reasonable  account  for  the  tremendous 
changes  which  the  earth  has  undergone,  and  it  shows  how  its  dissolution, 
so  clearly  described  in  St.  Teter's  Second  Epistle,  may  be  accomplished." 
—  T7if  Churchman,  Kcu:  York. 

"'Ragnakok' is  a  strong  and  brilliant  literary  production,  which 
will  command  the  interest  of  general  readers,  and  the  admiration  and 
respect,  if  not  the  universal  credence,  of  the  conservative  and  the  scien- 
tific."—Professor  Alexander  Winxhell,  in  The  Dial. 

"In  a  few  sharp,  short  and  decisive  chapters  the  author  disimses  of 
the  theory  that  the  vast  phenomena  of  the  'Drift'  could  have  been  pro- 
duced by  the  action  of  ice,  no  matter  if  the  ice  swept  over  the  continent. 
His  facts  and  their  application  are  certainly  impressive.  In  fact,  his 
book  is  very  original."— JJart/ord  Times. 

"Mr.  Donnelly  has  presented  the  scientific  world  with  another  nut. 
the  cracking  of  which  we  confess  to  an  anxiety  to  see  the  scientific 
world  attempt."—  Philadelphia  Trlegram. 

Chicago:    R.  S.  PEALE  &  CO.,  315  Wabash  Ave. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
Los  Angeles 

This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


Form  L9-Series  4939 


PLEA««v  DO   NOT    REMOVE 


ot  _ 


THIS   BOOK  CARD 


mil 
mil 


mn 


"O 
i"0 
■H:- 


^(f/OJlTVDJO^ 


University  Research  Library 


■o 

-i 


-T] 


_J 


:r] 


> 
c 

H 

o 


TO 


pf 


-]<>•! 


'   ,1',';    ,1    ■■  ,'  (■■'■^